Apelin is a peptide ligand for an orphan G-protein coupled receptor (APJ receptor) and serves as a critical gradient for migration of mesodermal cells fated to contribute to the myocardial lineage. The present study was designed to establish a robust cardiac differentiation protocol, specifically, to evaluate the effect of apelin on directed differentiation of mouse and human embryonic stem cel...

Congenital heart defects often result from improper differentiation of cardiac progenitor cells. Although transcription factors involved in cardiac progenitor cell differentiation have been described, the associated chromatin modifiers in this process remain largely unknown. Here we show that mouse embryos lacking the chromatin-modifying enzyme histone deacetylase 3 (Hdac3) in cardiac progenito...

BACKGROUND MiR-499 is a cardiac-abundant miRNA. However, the biological functions of miR-499 in differentiated cardiomyocytes or in the cardiomyocyte differentiation process is not very clear. Sox6 is believed to be one of its targets, and is also believed to play a role in cardiac differentiation. Therefore, our aim was to investigate the association between Sox6 and miR-499 during cardiac dif...

Significant progress has been made in defining pathways that mediate the formation of the mammalian heart. Little is known, however, about the genetic program that directs the differentiation of cardiac myocytes from their precursor cells. A major hindrance to this kind of investigation has been the absence of an appropriate cell culture model of cardiac myocyte differentiation. Recently, a sub...

introduction heart failure is the second most common cause of ascites after cirrhosis. there are cardiac and noncardiac etiologies of ascites, and the multimodality imaging approach is a rich tool to redefine the final diagnosis. case presentation we present a case-series where 3 patients were referred to our hospital for further hepatology assessment due to severe abdominal ascites and liver f...

A significant clinical need exists to differentiate human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) into cardiomyocytes, enabling tissue modeling for in vitro discovery of new drugs or cell-based therapies for heart repair in vivo. Chemical and mechanical microenvironmental factors are known to impact the efficiency of stem cell differentiation, but cardiac differentiation protocols in hPSCs are typically...

Interactions between the endoderm and mesoderm that mediate myocardial induction are difficult to study in vivo because of the small size of mammalian embryos at relevant stages. However, we and others have demonstrated that signals from endodermal cell lines can influence myocardial differentiation from both mouse and human embryoid bodies (EBs), and because of this, assays that utilize embryo...

The cardioprotective effects of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) and apolipoprotein A1 (apoA-I) are well documented, but their effects in the direction of the cardiac differentiation of embryonic stem cells are unknown. We evaluated the effects of exogenous apoA-I expression on cardiac differentiation of ESCs and maturation of ESC-derived cardiomyocytes. We stably over-expressed ful...

Several studies have demonstrated that miRNA are involved in cardiac development, stem cell maintenance, and differentiation. In particular, it has been shown that miRNA133, miRNA1, and miRNA499 are involved in progenitor cell differentiation into cardiomyocytes. However, it is unknown whether different miRNA may act synergistically to improve cardiac differentiation. We used mouse P19 cells as...