Pitx2 maintains mitochondrial function during regeneration to prevent myocardial fat deposition

Here, we performed single nuclear RNA-seq (snRNA-seq) of control and Pitx2 deficient cardiac tissue 3 weeks post myocardial infarction. Next, unsupervised graph-based clustering of the combined snRNA-Seq data set mapped to both introns and exons, comprising 7848 cells. Overall, we identified nine transcriptionally distinct clusters representing all the major cardiac cell types, including cardiac fibroblasts (FB), cardiomyocytes (CM), endothelial cells (EC), vascular smooth muscle cells (SMC), macrophages (Mφ), epicardial cells (EpiC), endocardial cells (EndoC), lymphatic endothelial cells (LEC), and mural cells or pericytes (PeC). Moreover, two distinct populations of fibroblasts, designated FB-1 and FB-2, were also identified. Cardiac tissue dissociated, nuclei were isolated via density gradient centrifugation, and then ran through the 10X Chromium device to generate snRNA-seq libraries that were sequenced on an Illumina NextSeq 500.