Project description:Gene expression profiling of immortalized human mesenchymal stem cells with hTERT/E6/E7 transfected MSCs. hTERT may change gene expression in MSCs. Goal was to determine the gene expressions of immortalized MSCs.
Project description:Tetralogy of Fallot (TOF) is the most commonly seen type of conotruncal congenital heart defect. Treatment of these patients has evolved dramatically in the last few decades, yet a genetic explanation for the failure of cardiac development is lacking for the majority of children with TOF. Our goal was to examine genome wide gene expression to characterize expression patterns in cardiovascular tissue (right ventricle, pulmonary valve and pulmonary artery) obtained at the time of reconstructive surgery from 19 children with tetralogy of Fallot. We employed genome wide gene expression microarrays to characterize cardiovascular tissue (right ventricle, pulmonary valve and pulmonary artery) obtained at the time of reconstructive surgery from 19 children with tetralogy of Fallot (16 idiopathic and 3 with 22q11.2 deletions) and compared gene expression patterns to normally developing subjects. We detected a signal from approximately 26,000 probes (ranging from 35% to 49% of array probes in the three tissues), reflecting expression from about half of all genes. More than 1000 genes had a 2-fold change in expression in the right ventricle (RV) of children with TOF compared to RV from matched control infants. Most of these genes were involved in compensatory functions (e.g., hypertrophy, cardiac fibrosis and cardiac dilation). However, two canonical pathways involved in spatial and temporal cell differentiation (WNT, p = 0.017 and Notch, p = 0.003) appeared to be generally suppressed. The suppression of developmental networks may be a remnant of a broad malfunction of regulatory pathways leading to inaccurate boundary formation and improper structural development in the embryonic heart. We suggest that small tissue specific genomic and/or epigenetic fluctuations could be cumulative, leading to regulatory network disruption and failure of proper cardiac development.
Project description:Transcriptional profiling of human mesenchymal stem cells comparing normoxic MSCs cells with hypoxic MSCs cells. Hypoxia may inhibit senescence of MSCs during expansion. Goal was to determine the effects of hypoxia on global MSCs gene expression.
Project description:CHD7 encodes an ATP-dependent chromatin remodeling factor. Mutation of this gene causes multiple developmental disorders including CHARGE syndrome, in which conotruncal anomalies are the most prevalent form of heart defects. How CHD7 regulates conotruncal development remains unclear. In this study, we establish that deletion of Chd7 in neural crest cells (NCCs) causes severe conotruncal defects and perinatal lethality. We thus provide the first mouse genetic evidence demonstrating that CHD7 cell-autonomously regulates cardiac NCC development, thereby clarifying a long-standing controversy in the literature. Using transcriptomic analyses, we show that CHD7 fine-tunes the expression of a gene network that is critical for cardiac NCC development. To gain further molecular insights into gene regulation by CHD7, we performed a protein-protein interaction screen by incubating recombinant CHD7 on a protein array. We find that CHD7 directly interacts with several developmental disorder-mutated proteins including WDR5, a core component of H3K4 methyltransferase complexes. This direct interaction suggested that CHD7 may recruit histone modifying enzymes to target loci, independently of its remodeling functions. We therefore generated a mouse model that harbors an ATPase-deficient allele and demonstrate that mutant CHD7 retains the ability to recruit H3K4 methyltransferase activity to its targets. Thus, our data uncover that CHD7 regulates cardiovascular development through ATP-dependent and -independent activities, shedding light on the etiology of CHD7-related congenital disorders. Importantly, our data also imply that patients carrying a premature stop codon versus missense mutations will likely display different molecular alterations; these patients might therefore require personalized therapeutic interventions.
Project description:Gene expression profiling of immortalized human mesenchymal stem cells with hTERT/E6/E7 transfected MSCs. hTERT may change gene expression in MSCs. Goal was to determine the gene expressions of immortalized MSCs. One-condition experment, gene expression of 3A6