Impact of exogenous IL-1ß stimulation on equine embryonic stem cell-derived tenocytes in three-dimensional culture

Exogenous IL-1ß stimulation impacts tendon-associated and inflammatory gene expression in equine adult tenocytes but has no impact on embryonic stem cell (ESC)-derived tenocytes in two-dimensional culture. Whether these effects translate to the transcriptome-wide level in three-dimensional (3D) culture in unknown. Utilising RNA-Sequencing, we report that ESC-tenocytes have zero differentially expressed genes following two-weeks of IL-1ß stimulation with similar collagen gel contraction values between the control and IL-1ß conditions, respectively. We examined global gene expression profiles of three biological replicates of equine embryonic stem cell-derived tenocytes following two weeks of exogenous IL-1ß stimulation (1 nM) versus control. To examine if there were any differentially expressed genes between the two conditions, we utilised DESeq2 (LogFC >1 + padj<0.05) following Salmon alignment and tximport.