Disease Modeling and Disease Gene Discovery in Cardiomyopathies: A Molecular Study of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Generated Cardiomyocytes.
Satish Kumar, Joanne E Curran, Kashish Kumar, Erica DeLeon, Ana C Leandro, Juan Peralta, Sarah Williams-Blangero, John Blangero
Author Information
Satish Kumar: Department of Human Genetics and South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Institute, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine, McAllen, TX 78504, USA. ORCID
Joanne E Curran: Department of Human Genetics and South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Institute, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine, Brownsville, TX 78520, USA. ORCID
Kashish Kumar: Department of Human Genetics and South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Institute, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine, McAllen, TX 78504, USA.
Erica DeLeon: Department of Human Genetics and South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Institute, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine, McAllen, TX 78504, USA.
Ana C Leandro: Department of Human Genetics and South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Institute, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine, Brownsville, TX 78520, USA. ORCID
Juan Peralta: Department of Human Genetics and South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Institute, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine, Brownsville, TX 78520, USA.
Sarah Williams-Blangero: Department of Human Genetics and South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Institute, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine, McAllen, TX 78504, USA.
John Blangero: Department of Human Genetics and South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Institute, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine, Brownsville, TX 78520, USA.
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 (-value = 4.36 × 10), primary heart tissue (-value = 1.37 × 10) and cardiomyopathy (-value = 1.13 × 10) 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.
