Generation and molecular characterization of human pluripotent stem cell-derived pharyngeal foregut endoderm

Summary

Approaches to study human pharyngeal foregut endoderm—a developmental intermediate that is linked to various human syndromes involving pharynx development and organogenesis of tissues such as thymus, parathyroid, and thyroid—have been hampered by scarcity of tissue access and cellular models. We present an efficient stepwise differentiation method to generate human pharyngeal foregut endoderm from pluripotent stem cells. We determine dose and temporal requirements of signaling pathway engagement for optimized differentiation and characterize the differentiation products on cellular and integrated molecular level. We present a computational classification tool, "CellMatch," and transcriptomic classification of differentiation products on an integrated mouse scRNA-seq developmental roadmap confirms cellular maturation. Integrated transcriptomic and chromatin analyses infer differentiation stage-specific gene regulatory networks. Our work provides the method and integrated multiomic resource for the investigation of disease-relevant loci and gene regulatory networks and their role in developmental defects affecting the pharyngeal endoderm and its derivatives.