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The ability to generate astrocytes from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) offers a promising cellular model to study the development and physiology of human astrocytes. The extant methods for generating functional astrocytes required long culture periods and there remained much ambiguity on whether such paradigms follow the innate developmental program. In this report, we provided an efficient and rapid method for generating physiologically functional astrocytes from hPSCs.Overexpressing the nuclear factor IB in hPSC-derived neural precursor cells induced a highly enriched astrocyte population in 2 weeks. RNA sequencing and functional analyses demonstrated progressive transcriptomic and physiological changes in the cells, resembling in vivo astrocyte development. Further analyses substantiated previous results and established the MAPK pathway necessary for astrocyte differentiation. Hence, this differentiation paradigm provides a prospective in vitro model for human astrogliogenesis studies and the pathophysiology of neurological diseases concerning astrocytes.

Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) is biocompatible, easy to fabricate, and has piezoelectric properties; it has been used for many biomedical applications including stem cell engineering. However, long‐term cultivation of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and their differentiation toward cardiac lineages on PVDF have not been investigated. Herein, PVDF nanoscaled membrane scaffolds were fabricated by electrospinning; a vitronectin‐derived peptide‐mussel adhesive protein fusion (VNm) was immobilized on the scaffolds. hESCs cultured on the VNm‐coated PVDF scaffold (VNm–PVDF scaffold) were stably expanded for more than 10 passages while maintaining the expression of pluripotency markers and genomic integrity. Under cardiac differentiation conditions, hESCs on the VNm–PVDF scaffold generated more spontaneously beating colonies and showed the upregulation of cardiac‐related genes, compared with those cultured on Matrigel and VNm alone. Thus, VNm–PVDF scaffolds may be suitable for the long‐term culture of hESCs and their differentiation into cardiac cells, thus expanding their application in regenerative medicine.

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