On May 20, a team led by Professor Bichun Li and Professor Guohong Chen from the College of Animal Science and Technology at Yangzhou University published online an article in Nature Communications titled "Production of viable chicken by allogeneic transplantation of primordial germ cells induced from somatic cells".
The allogeneic transplantation of primordial germ cells (PGCs) derived from somatic cells overcomes the limitation of avian cloning. Here, they transdifferentiate chicken embryo fibroblasts (CEFs) from black feathered Langshan chickens to PGCs and transplant them into White Plymouth Rock chicken embryos to produce viable offspring with characteristics inherited from the donor. They express Oct4/Sox2/Nanog/Lin28A (OSNL) to reprogram CEFs to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which are further induced to differentiate into PGCs by BMP4/BMP8b/EGF. DNA demethylation, histone acetylation and glycolytic activation elevate the iPSC induction efficiency, while histone acetylation and glycolytic inhibition facilitate PGCs formation. The induced PGCs (iPGCs) are transplanted into the recipients, which are self-crossed to produce 189/509 somatic cells derived chicken with the donor’s characteristics. Microsatellite analysis and genome sequencing confirm the inheritance of genetic information from the donor. Thus, they demonstrate the feasibility of avian cloning from somatic cells.
The article is co-authored by Rui Feng Zhao, Xia Yuan and Qisheng Zuo, with Prof. Bichun Li and Prof. Guohong Chen as co-corresponding authors. This research was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23242-5