TY - JOUR T1 - Axonal transcriptome of human stem cell derived neurons JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/066142 SP - 066142 AU - Rebecca L. Bigler AU - Joyce W. Kamande AU - Raluca Dumitru AU - Mark Niedringhaus AU - Anne Marion Taylor Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/27/066142.abstract N2 - The identification of axonal mRNAs in model organisms has led to the discovery of multiple proteins synthesized within axons that are required for axon guidance and injury response. The extent to which these axonal mRNAs are conserved in humans is unknown. Here we report on the axonal transcriptome of glutamatergic neurons derived from human embryonic stem cells (hESC-neurons) grown in axon isolating microfluidic chambers. We identified mRNAs proportionally enriched in axons, representing a functionally unique local transcriptome as compared to the transcriptome of whole neurons inclusive of somata, dendrites, and axons. Additionally, we found that the most abundant axonal mRNAs in hESC-neurons functionally resemble the most abundant mRNAs in rat cortical neurons. The main functional categories of transcripts common to both datasets being “translational elongation”, “intracellular” and “synapse”. Pairwise comparison of our list of abundant human axonal transcripts to five similar previously published datasets generated from rat and mouse axons revealed hundreds of conserved axonal mRNAs. This new evaluation of mRNA within human axons provides an important resource for studying local mRNA translation in human neurons and has the potential to reveal both conserved and unique axonal mechanisms across species and neuronal types. ER -