The identification of cardiac cells with stem cell properties changed the paradigm of the heart as a post mitotic organ. These cells proliferate and differentiate into cardiomyocytes, endothelial and vascular smooth muscle cells, providing for cardiac cell homeostasis and regeneration. microRNAs are master switches controlling proliferation and differentiation, in particular regulating stem cel...

Commitment of mesodermal cells to the cardiac lineage is a very early event that occurs during gastrulation, and differentiation of cardiac muscle cells begins in the presomite stage prior to formation of the beating heart tube. However, the molecular events, including gene products that are required for differentiation of cardiac muscle cells, remain essentially unknown. GATA-4 is a recently c...

Cardiac fibrosis occurs naturally after myocardial infarction. While the initially formed fibrotic tissue prevents the infarcted heart tissue from rupture, the progression of cardiac fibrosis continuously expands the size of fibrotic tissue and causes cardiac function decrease. Cardiac fibrosis eventually evolves the infarcted hearts into heart failure. Inhibiting cardiac fibrosis from progress...

Despite the critical importance of TBX5 in normal development and disease, relatively little is known about the mechanisms by which TBX5 functions in the embryonic heart. Our present studies demonstrate that TBX5 is necessary to control the length of the embryonic cardiac cell cycle, with depletion of TBX5 leading to cardiac cell cycle arrest in late G(1)- or early S-phase. Blocking cell cycle ...

Somatic stem cells require specific niches and three-dimensional scaffolds provide ways to mimic this microenvironment. Here, we studied a scaffold based on Fucoidan, a sulfated polysaccharide known to influence morphogen gradients during embryonic development, to support human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) differentiation toward the cardiac lineage. A macroporous (pore 200 μm) Fucoidan scaffold...

Background—Embryonic stem cell (ESC)–derived cardiomyocytes are anticipated to serve as a useful source for future cell-based cardiovascular disease therapies. Research emphasis is currently focused on determining methods to direct the differentiation of ESCs to a large population of cardiomyocytes with high purity. To this aim, understanding the molecular mechanisms that control ESC-to-cardiom...

Despite over a decade of intense research, the identity and differentiation potential of human adult cardiac progenitor cells (aCPC) remains controversial. Cardiospheres have been proposed as a means to expand aCPCs in vitro, but the identity of the progenitor cell within these 3D structures is unknown. We show that clones derived from cardiospheres could be subdivided based on expression of th...

Mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) and human foreskin fibroblasts (hFFs) are commonly used as feeder cells to maintain the pluripotent state of stem cells. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effect of MEF and hFF feeders on the cardiac differentiation. Two human embryonic and two induced pluripotent stem cell lines were cultured on MEF and hFF before cardiac differentiation. The e...

Cellular cardiomyoplasty has emerged as a novel therapy to restore contractile function of injured failing myocardium. Human multipotent muscle derived stem cells (MDSC) can be a potential abundant, autologous cell source for cardiac repair. However, robust conditions for cardiomyocyte (CM) differentiation are not well established for this cell type. We have developed a new method for CM differ...