Striatal neurons directly converted from Huntington’s disease patient fibroblasts recapitulate age-associated disease phenotypes

Abstract

In Huntington’s disease (HD), expansion of CAG codons within the huntingtin gene ( HTT) leads to the aberrant formation of protein aggregates and the differential degeneration of striatal medium spiny neurons (MSNs). Modeling HD using patient-specific MSNs has been challenging, as neurons differentiated from induced pluripotent stem cells are free of aggregates and lack an overt cell death phenotype. Here we generated MSNs from HD patient fibroblasts through microRNA-based neuronal conversion, previously shown to bypass the induction of pluripotency and retain age signatures of original fibroblasts. We found that patient MSNs consistently exhibited mutant HTT (mHTT) aggregates, mHTT-dependent DNA damage, mitochondrial dysfunction, and spontaneous degeneration over time in culture. We further provide evidence that erasure of age stored in starting fibroblasts and neuronal conversion of pre-symptomatic HD patient fibroblasts resulted in differential manifestation of cellular phenotypes associated with HD, highlighting the importance of age in modeling late-onset neurological disorders.