Lineage Reprogramming of mouse fibroblasts into induced cardiac progenitor cells by defined factors

Mouse adult cardiac fibroblasts were infected with doxycycline inducible, 11 cardiac factors. Addition of doxycycline resulted in appearance of proliferative cells that had high nuclear-to-cytoplasmic ratio. We called these cells iCPCs. iCPC were stably reporgrammed and could be maintined in proliferative state without doxycycline. Here we compared the transcriptome of iCPC with their parental cells; adult cardiac fibroblasts. We found that iCPCs have upregulated genes involved in cardiovascular development and downregulated fibroblasts specific genes. iCPCs did not expressed endoderm, ectoderm or pluripotency associated genes indicating that they were cardiac mesoderm restricted progenitors. Overall design: We isolated RNA from low passage iCPCs, high passage iCPCs and cardiac fibroblasts and performed RNASeq analysis