BMP10 signaling promotes the development of endocardial cells from human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiovascular progenitors
We established a differentiation strategy to generate endocardial-like cells from hPSCs. Endocardial-like cells generated from our protocol display major functional properties of endocardium in developing embryo: they can induce trabecular markers in early hPSC-derived ventricular cardiomyocytes and they can undergo endothelial-to-mesenchymal-trasition under appropriate conditions. Furthermore, the transcriptome of our in vitro generated endocardial cells showed a very high level of correlation to that of primary fetal endocardial cells.  Functional properties and transcriptional profile of hPSC-derived endocardial cells were also compared to those of control (non-endocardial) endothelial cells. For scRNA-seq analysis live cells from bulk endocardial and control endothelial differentiation cultures were labeled with two different sets of anti-human Hashtag antibodies before sequencing. Single cell RNA sequencing was carried out on a sample consisting of 85% bulk endocardial cells (TotalSeq-A0255 anti-human Hashtag 5 antibody, BioLegend) and 15% bulk control endothelial cells (TotalSeq-A0254 anti-human Hashtag 4, Biolegend). Overall design: Examination of heterogeneity and global transcriptome between hPSC-derived endocardial-like cells and control (non-endocardial) endothelial cells.