What your heart doth know

Abstract

Combining embryological insight with careful analysis of early stage cardiomyocyte differentiation, Kattman et al. (2011) in this issue of Cell Stem Cell have defined minimal culture conditions to efficiently produce cardiomyocytes from hESCs and hiPSCs. The lessons learned are applicable to the derivation of other organotypic cell types.

Figure 1

A small number of factors can efficiently drive cardiomyogenesis in PSCs (upper panel) in an apparent recapitulation of the processes that direct heart development, as depicted for mouse between days 3–8 of gestation (E3-8; lower panel). Nodal, Wnt and BMP induce cardiogenic mesoderm (blue), but then need to be blocked in order for cardiac development to proceed, constraining heart development to a region of anterior endoderm in the late gastrula-stage embryo (red region of the E7-7.5 embryo, lower panel). As a result of this work, the emphasis of future research will shift to decipher how diverse types of mature cardiomyocytes can be generated, and other lineages can be similarly derived, such as hepatocytes from endoderm (brown) and hematopoetic cells from posteriorized mesoderm (purple).