Comparison of rat neonatal ventricular cardiomyocytes and myofibroblasts transcriptomic profiles: Consequences of exposure to cyclic stretch.. Neo-MFB-Strain-Transcript

The present study investigated the transcriptomic profiles of cardiomyocytes and myofibroblasts. We compared the transcriptome of both cell types under non-stretched conditions and following exposure to cyclic stretch mimicking the beating heart. Cells were derived from primary cultures of neonatal rat ventricles with cardiomyocytes and myofibroblasts separated through a specific pre-plating procedure. Half of the cultured cells were exposed to cyclic stretch for 7h with an amplitude of 10% at a frequency of 3Hz. After isolation and quality control, total RNA was processed, and deep sequencing performed for subsequent gene expression analysis. We provide a list of differentially expressed RNAs ranked according to their level of expression. Cyclic stretch modified the transcriptome of myofibroblasts, whereas no changes were observed in cardiomyocytes. As most in vitro studies are performed with static cell cultures, our findings emphasize the potential importance of in vivo-like strain patterns for the interpretation of research data. Moreover, the results indicate that gene expression of cardiac myofibroblasts is highly sensitive to cyclic strain, in contrast to cardiomyocytes.