Disease Modeling and Disease Gene Discovery in Cardiomyopathies: A Molecular Study of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Generated Cardiomyocytes

Authors

Satish Kumar, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Joanne E. Curran, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
Kashish Kumar, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Erica De Leon, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Ana C. Leandro, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Juan M. Peralta, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Sarah Williams-Blangero, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
John Blangero, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-24-2021

Abstract

The in vitro modeling of cardiac development and cardiomyopathies in human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived cardiomyocytes (CMs) provides opportunities to aid the discovery of genetic, molecular, and developmental changes that are causal to, or influence, cardiomyopathies and related diseases. To better understand the functional and disease modeling potential of iPSC-differentiated CMs and to provide a proof of principle for large, epidemiological-scale disease gene discovery approaches into cardiomyopathies, well-characterized CMs, generated from validated iPSCs of 12 individuals who belong to four sibships, and one of whom reported a major adverse cardiac event (MACE), were analyzed by genome-wide mRNA sequencing. The generated CMs expressed CM-specific genes and were highly concordant in their total expressed transcriptome across the 12 samples (correlation coefficient at 95% CI =0.92 ± 0.02). The functional annotation and enrichment analysis of the 2116 genes that were significantly upregulated in CMs suggest that generated CMs have a transcriptomic and functional profile of immature atrial-like CMs; however, the CMs-upregulated transcriptome also showed high overlap and significant enrichment in primary cardiomyocyte (p-value = 4.36 × 10⁻⁹), primary heart tissue (p-value = 1.37 × 10⁻⁴¹) and cardiomyopathy (p-value = 1.13 × 10⁻²¹) associated gene sets. Modeling the effect of MACE in the generated CMs-upregulated transcriptome identified gene expression phenotypes consistent with the predisposition of the MACE-affected sibship to arrhythmia, prothrombotic, and atherosclerosis risk.

Comments

© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Recommended Citation

Kumar, S.; Curran, J.E.; Kumar, K.; DeLeon, E.; Leandro, A.C.; Peralta, J.; Williams-Blangero, S.; Blangero, J. Disease Modeling and Disease Gene Discovery in Cardiomyopathies: A Molecular Study of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Generated Cardiomyocytes. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2021, 22, 3311. https:// doi.org/10.3390/ijms22073311

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Publication Title

Int. J. Mol. Sci.

DOI

10.3390/ijms22073311

Academic Level

faculty

Mentor/PI Department

Office of Human Genetics