The transcriptome of human iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes
Currently, cardiomyocytes differentiated from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are routinely generated for disease research and drug development as an alternative to animal models. Although iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes (iPSC-CMs) are generally assumed to resemble myocytes in the fetal heart, a systematic global comparison is still lacking. We established a robust differentiation protocol to generate mature cardiomyocytes from male and female iPSC lines, and investigated their gene expression and splicing profiles, compared to that of human hearts at different stages of development.