While many studies of neurodegeneration and synaptic dysfunction use either primary mouse or human fetal glia for human neuron co-culture (Johnson et al., 2007, Kiskinis et al., 2014, Verheyen et al., 2015), these methods are limited by species-specific differences in astrocyte functions and limited access to human fetal samples. Our hiPSC-astrocytes overcome these drawbacks, making possible hiPSC-based astrocyte-neuron (Jiang et al., 2013) and astrocyte-microglia (Muffat et al., 2016, Pandya et al., 2017) co-culture platforms for uncovering disease-related mechanisms in vitro, which should help to reveal how the crosstalk between these three neural cell types contributes to neurological and psychiatric disease.
