Transcriptional profiling of isogenic Friedreich ataxia induced pluripotent stem cell-derived neurons

Friedreich ataxia (FRDA) is a rare childhood neurodegenerative disorder with no effective treatment. FRDA is caused by transcriptional silencing of the FXN gene and consequent loss of the essential mitochondrial protein frataxin. Based on the knowledge that a GAA•TTC repeat expansion in the first intron of FXN leads to heterochromatin formation and gene silencing, we have shown that members of the 2-aminobenzamide family of histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACi) reproducibly increase FXN mRNA levels in induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived FRDA neuronal cells and in peripheral blood mononuclear cells from patients treated with the drug in a phase I clinical trial. How the reduced expression of frataxin leads to neurological and other systemic symptoms in FRDA patients remains unclear. Similarly to other triplet repeat disorders, it is not known why only specific cells types are affected in the disease, primarily the large sensory neurons of the dorsal root ganglia and cardiomyocytes. The combination of iPSC technology and genome editing techniques offers the unique possibility of addressing these questions in a relevant cell model of the disease, without the confounding effect of different genetic backgrounds. We derived a set of isogenic iPSC lines that differ only in the length of the GAA•TTC repeats, using “scarless” gene-editing methods (helper-dependent adenovirus-mediated homologous recombination). To uncover the gene expression signature due to GAA•TTC repeat expansion in FRDA neuronal cells and the effect of HDACi on these changes, we performed transcriptomic analysis of iPSC-derived central nervous system (CNS) and isogenic sensory neurons by RNA sequencing. We find that multiple cellular pathways are commonly affected by the loss of frataxin in CNS and peripheral nervous system neurons and these changes are partially restored by HDACi treatment.