Transcriptomics analysis of human iPSC-derived dopaminergic neurons reveals a novel model for sporadic Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive, neurodegenerative disease affecting over 1% of the population beyond 65 years of age. Although some PD cases are inheritable, the majority of PD cases occur in a sporadic manner. Risk factors comprise next to heredity, age, and gender also exposure to neurotoxins from for instance pesticides and herbicides. As PD is characterized by a loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra, it is nearly impossible to access and extract these cells from patients for investigating disease mechanisms. The emergence of induced pluripotent stem (iPSC) technology allows differentiating and growing human dopaminergic neurons, which can be used for in vitro disease modeling. Here, we differentiated human iPSCs into dopaminergic neurons, and subsequently exposed the cells to increasing concentrations of the neurotoxin MPP+. Temporal transcriptomics analysis revealed a strong time- and dose-dependent response with genes over-represented across pathways involved in PD etiology such as “Parkinson’s Disease”, “Dopaminergic signaling” and “calcium signaling”. Moreover, we validated this disease model by showing robust overlap with a meta-analysis of transcriptomics data from substantia nigra from post-mortem PD patients. The overlap included genes linked to e.g. mitochondrial dysfunction, neuron differentiation, apoptosis and inflammation. Our data shows, that MPP+-induced, human iPSC-derived dopaminergic neurons present molecular perturbations as observed in the etiology of PD. Therefore we propose iPSC-derived dopaminergic neurons as a foundation for a novel sporadic PD model to study the pathomolecular mechanisms of PD, but also to screen for novel anti-PD drugs and to develop and test new treatment strategies.