A three-dimensional culture model of innervated human skeletal muscle enables studies of the adult neuromuscular junction and disease modeling

Abstract

Two-dimensional (2D) human skeletal muscle fiber cultures are ill equipped to support the contractile properties of maturing muscle fibers. This limits their application to the study of adult human neuromuscular junction (NMJ) development, a process requiring maturation of muscle fibers in the presence of motor neuron endplates. Here we describe a three-dimensional (3D) co-culture method whereby human muscle progenitors mixed with human pluripotent stem cell-derived motor neurons self-organize to form functional NMJ connections within two weeks. Functional connectivity between motor neuron endplates and muscle fibers is confirmed with calcium transient imaging and electrophysiological recordings. Notably, we only observed epsilon acetylcholine receptor subunit protein upregulation and activity in 3D co-culture. This demonstrates that the 3D co-culture system supports a developmental shift from the embryonic to adult form of the receptor that does not occur in 2D co-culture. Further, 3D co-culture treatments with myasthenia gravis patient sera shows the ease of studying human disease with the system. This work delivers a simple, reproducible, and adaptable method to model and evaluate adult human NMJ de novo development and disease in culture.