BACKGROUND We previously demonstrated oxymatrine, an alkaloid from the Chinese medicine radix Sophorae flavescentis, ameliorates hemodynamic disturbances and cardiac fibrosis; however, the underlying mechanisms are unclear. Here, we investigated the effect and mechanism of action of oxymatrine on aldosterone-induced cardiac fibroblast to myofibroblast differentiation in vitro. METHODS Cardiac...

Cell-based therapies using pluripotent stem cells hold great promise as regenerative approaches to treat many types of diseases. Nevertheless many challenges remain and, perhaps foremost, is the issue of how to direct and enhance the specification and differentiation of a desired cell type for potential therapeutics. We have examined the molecular basis for the inverse correlation of cardiac an...

background: marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (mscs) have been heralded as a source of great promise for the regeneration of the infarcted heart. there are no clear data as to whether or not in vitro differentiation of mscs into major myocardial cells can increase the beneficial effects of mscs. the aim of this study was to address this issue. methods: to induce mscs to transdifferentiate i...

Human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-derived cardiomyocytes (CMs) offer a promising source for heart regeneration, disease modeling, and drug screening. Recent developments in organoid technology have made it possible to study how hiPSC-derived CMs interact together, this culture system mimics the tissue environment behavior of cardiac cells our body. However, similarities differences be...

Advances in developmental cardiology have increased our understanding of the early aspects of heart differentiation. However, understanding noncoding RNA (ncRNA) transcription and regulation during this process remains elusive. Here, we constructed transcriptomes for both long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) and circular RNAs (circRNAs) in four important developmental stages ranging from early embryon...

Dissection of cardiomyocyte differentiation process at the cellular level is indispensable in the research for cardiac development and regeneration. Previously, we have established an embryonic stem cell differentiation system that reproduces early vascular development from progenitor cells that express Flk1, a vascular endothelial growth factor receptor, by the combinatory application of 2-dim...

Cellular transplantation has been employed for several years to deliver donor cardiomyocytes to normal and injured hearts. Recent reports of a variety of stem cells with apparent cardiomyogenic potential have raised the possibility of cell transplantation-based therapeutic interventions for heart disease. Here we review the preclinical studies demonstrating that intracardiac transplantation of ...

Progenitor cells of the first and second heart fields depend on cardiac-specific transcription factors for their differentiation. Using conditional mutagenesis of mouse embryos, we define the hierarchy of signaling events that controls the expression of cardiac-specific transcription factors during differentiation of cardiac progenitors at embryonic day 9.0. Wnt/β-catenin and Bmp act downstream...

Bioengineered functional cardiac tissue is expected to contribute to the repair of injured heart tissue. We previously developed cardiac cell sheets using mouse embryonic stem (mES) cell-derived cardiomyocytes, a system to generate an appropriate number of cardiomyocytes derived from ES cells and the underlying mechanisms remain elusive. In the present study, we established a cultivation system...

An understanding of the mechanism that regulates the cardiac differentiation of pluripotent stem cells is necessary for the effective generation and expansion of cardiomyocytes as cell therapy products. In the present study, we have identified genes that modulate the cardiac differentiation of pluripotent embryonic cells. We isolated P19CL6 cell sublines that possess distinct properties in card...