In addition, they retain the potential to differentiate into multiple cardiac cell lineages.
After differentiation, Sca-1+ cells presented specific marker expression patterns of multiple cardiac cell lineages, such as sMHC, SMA and calponin for smooth muscle, CD31, vWF and VE-cadherin for endothelial cells, and cTNT, cMHC and MLC for cardiomyocytes.
Supporting this notion, cardiac-structural genes were minimally expressed and often lacked another essential repressive mark, H3K27me3, in human ESCs and early stage cells of multiple non-cardiac lineages (Paige et al., 2012; Xie et al., 2013).
The ideal source of stem cells depends on multiple factors such as the ease of extraction/isolation, effectiveness of engraftment, ability to differentiate into cardiac lineages and effect on cardiac function.
As key markers of cardiac lineages, transcripts for Nkx2.5, alphaMHC, Mlc2v, and cTnT could be identified.
This highlights a close developmental relationship between blood and cardiac lineages and supports the notion of plasticity.
Understanding the complexity of cardiac physiology requires system-level studies of multiple cardiac cell types.
Expression of transcription factors governing differentiation along skeletal or cardiac lineages was evaluated by immunoblotting.
Both sources have demonstrated successful differentiation into cardiac lineages as well as positive impacts on cardiac function in animal models.
Therefore, it is essential to differentiate the cells into cardiac lineages prior to transplantation.
