Arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy (ACM) is characterized by fibro-fatty replacement of the myocardium, heart failure and life-threatening ventricular arrhythmias. Causal mutations were identified in genes encoding for proteins desmosomes, predominantly plakophilin-2 (PKP2) desmoglein-2 (DSG2). We generated gene-edited knock-out iPSC lines PKP2 (JMUi001-A-2) DSG2 (JMUi001-A-3) using CRISPR/Cas9 syst...

Embryonic stem cell-derived embryoid bodies contain a unique precursor population which, in response to vascular endothelial growth factor, gives rise to blast colonies in semi-solid medium. Upon transfer to liquid culture with appropriate cytokines, these blast colonies generate both hematopoietic and adherent, stromal-type cells. Cells within the adherent population display characteristics of...

OBJECTIVE Vezf1 encodes an early zinc finger transcription factor that is essential for normal vascular development and functions in a dose-dependent manner. Here, we investigated the role of Vezf1 during processes of endothelial cell differentiation and maturation by studying mutant Vezf1 embryonic stem (ES) cells using the in vitro embryoid body differentiation model and the in vivo teratocar...

The use of human pluripotent stem cells in basic and translational cardiac research requires efficient differentiation protocols towards cardiomyocytes. In vitro differentiation yields heterogeneous populations of ventricular-, atrial-, and nodal-like cells hindering their potential applications in regenerative therapies. We described the effect of the growth factor Activin A during early human...

Fibroblast growth factors and receptors are intimately connected to the extracellular matrix by their affinity to heparan sulfate proteoglycans. They mediate multiple processes during embryonic development and adult life. In this study, embryonic stem cell-derived embryoid bodies were used to model fibroblast growth factor signaling during early epithelial morphogenesis. To avoid redundancy cau...

The primitive endoderm epithelial structure in mouse blastocysts forms following cell differentiation and subsequent sorting, and this two-step process can be reproduced in vitro using an embryoid body model. We found that in the chimeric embryoid bodies consisting of paired wildtype and E-cadherin null ES cells, the wildtype sorted to the center and were enveloped by the less adhesive E-cadher...

Embryonic stem cells, derived from the inner cell mass of murine blastocysts, can be maintained in a totipotent state in vitro. In appropriate conditions embryonic stem cells have been shown to differentiate in vitro into various derivatives of all three primary germ layers. We describe in this paper conditions to induce differentiation of embryonic stem cells reliably and at high efficiency in...

Two-dimensional electrophoresis was used to find changes in protein synthesis occurring as pluripotent embryonal carcinoma (EC) cells differentiate to give embryoid bodies in vitro. 2-D patterns from other embryonic cell lines, and from the inner cell mass (ICM) cells of mouse embryos, were also analysed for the expression of those proteins showing some change during embryoid body formation and...