A Resource of Gene Expression Data from a Multiethnic Population Cohort of Induced Pluripotent Cell–Derived Cardiomyocytes

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), upon differentiation into somatic cell types, offer the ability to model the genetic states of tissues in the individuals from whom the iPSCs were derived. A recent study used a multiethnic cohort of healthy individuals to derive iPSCs and iPSC-hepatocytes and perform gene expression and expression quantitative trait locus analyses, identifying causal genes and variants linked to blood lipid levels.2 We sought to use the same cohort of iPSC lines to generate a similar resource with iPSC-cardiomyocytes and make the results available to the community. Overall design: Mononuclear cells isolated from peripheral blood samples of 91 healthy individuals were used to generate iPSC lines.We differentiated the various cell lines (one per individual) into iPSC-CMs using an established 2-dimensional differentiation protocol. We found that a total of 71 iPSC-CM lines (34 from individuals self-identified as African-Americans and 37 from individuals self-identified as European-Americans; 44 from women, 32 from men) were ?80% positive for troponin T staining (AB-8295, abcam) using flow cytometry. We performed next generation RNA-seq analysis on these cell lines and create a transcriptome repository