Heart development requires a precise temporal regulation of gene expression in cardiomyoblasts. Therefore, the transcriptional changes differentiating cells can lead to congenital heart diseases. Although genetic mutations underlie most these alterations, exposure environmental contaminants, such as bisphenol A (BPA), has been recently considered risk factor well. In this study we investigated ...

The molecular mechanisms underlying mesodermal and cardiac specification from embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are not fully understood. Here, we showed that the BTB domain-containing zinc finger protein CIBZ is expressed in mouse ESCs but is dramatically downregulated during ESC differentiation. CIBZ deletion in ESCs induced specification toward mesoderm phenotypes and their differentiation into ca...

AIMS Cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors (CDKIs) play a critical role in negatively regulating the proliferation of cardiomyocytes, although their role in cardiac differentiation remains largely undetermined. We have shown that the most prominent CDKI in Xenopus, p27(Xic1)(Xic1), plays a role in neuronal and myotome differentiation beyond its ability to arrest the cell cycle. Thus, we investigat...

Maternal nicotine exposure causes alteration of gene expression and cardiovascular programming. The discovery of nicotine-medicated regulation in cardiogenesis is of major importance for the study of cardiac defects. The present study investigated the effect of nicotine on cardiac gene expression and epigenetic regulation during myocardial differentiation. Persistent nicotine exposure selective...

Over the past decade, extensive work in animal models and humans has identified the presence of adult cardiac progenitor cells, capable of cardiomyogenic differentiation and likely contributors to cardiomyocyte turnover during normal development and disease. Among cardiac progenitor cells, there is a distinct subpopulation, termed "side population" (SP) progenitor cells, identified by their uni...

OBJECTIVE Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ (PPARγ) is a member of the PPAR nuclear receptor superfamily. Although PPARγ acts as a master transcription factor in adipocyte differentiation, it is also associated with a variety of cell functions including carbohydrate and lipid metabolism, glucose homeostasis, cell proliferation and cell differentiation. This study aimed to assess the ...