Data for "CD32 captures committed haemogenic endothelial cells during human embryonic development"

During embryonic development, blood cells emerge from specialized endothelial cells, named hemogenic endothelial cells (HECs). As HECs are rare and transiently found during very early development, it remains difficult to distinguish them from endothelial cells. Here, we performed transcriptomic analysis of 28-32 day human embryos, and observed that the expression of Fc receptor CD32 (FCGR2B), is highly enriched in the endothelial cell population that contains HECs. Functional analyses using human embryonic and hPSC-derived endothelial cells revealed that robust multilineage hematopoietic potential is harbored within CD32+ endothelial cells and showed that 90% of CD32+ endothelial cells are bona fide HECs. Remarkably, these analyses indicated that HECs progress through different states, culminating in FCGR2B expression, at which point cells are irreversibly committed to a hematopoietic fate. These findings provide a precise method for isolating HECs from human embryos and hPSC cultures, thus allowing the efficient generation of hematopoietic cells in vitro.