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Review
. 2024 Mar 26;22(1):313.
doi: 10.1186/s12967-024-05108-8.

Recent advances in endothelial colony-forming cells: from the transcriptomic perspective

Yaqiong Liu  1 , Caomhán J Lyons  1 , Christine Ayu  1 , Timothy O'Brien  2
Affiliations
Review

Recent advances in endothelial colony-forming cells: from the transcriptomic perspective

Yaqiong Liu et al. J Transl Med. .

Abstract

Endothelial colony-forming cells (ECFCs) are progenitors of endothelial cells with significant proliferative and angiogenic ability. ECFCs are a promising treatment option for various diseases, such as ischemic heart disease and peripheral artery disease. However, some barriers hinder the clinical application of ECFC therapeutics. One of the current obstacles is that ECFCs are dysfunctional due to the underlying disease states. ECFCs exhibit dysfunctional phenotypes in pathologic states, which include but are not limited to the following: premature neonates and pregnancy-related diseases, diabetes mellitus, cancers, haematological system diseases, hypoxia, pulmonary arterial hypertension, coronary artery diseases, and other vascular diseases. Besides, ECFCs are heterogeneous among donors, tissue sources, and within cell subpopulations. Therefore, it is important to elucidate the underlying mechanisms of ECFC dysfunction and characterize their heterogeneity to enable clinical application. In this review, we summarize the current and potential application of transcriptomic analysis in the field of ECFC biology. Transcriptomic analysis is a powerful tool for exploring the key molecules and pathways involved in health and disease and can be used to characterize ECFC heterogeneity.

Keywords: Cell dysfunction; Endothelial colony forming cells; Heterogeneity; Transcriptome analysis.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Comparison of endothelial colony-forming cells (ECFCs) and myeloid angiogenic cells (MACs). ECFCs and MACs differ in terms of their source of origin, cell surface marker, and their specific roles in angiogenesis. EPCs: endothelial progenitor cells, ECs: endothelial cells, CFU-ECs: endothelial cell colony-forming units, CFU-Hill: colony forming unit-Hill, CACs: circulating angiogenic cell, CEPs: circulating endothelial progenitor cell
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
ECFCs heterogeneity. ECFCs exhibit heterogeneity among donors, tissues of origin, clonal subsets, and at the single cell level
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Three transcriptomic analytic approaches: microarray (A), bulk RNA sequence (B), and single cell sequence (C). The three transcriptomic approaches have different working principle to detect gene expression of ECFCs. The bioinformatics analysis is applied to identify key genes and pathways. The DEGs from different groups can be visualized using volcano plot. Kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes (KEGG) and gene set enrichment analysis can be performed to identify key pathways. Protein protein interaction (PPI) network is able to show the association of proteins
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
ECFCs-secreted extracellular vehicles (EVs) therapy for various diseases. As shown in the figure above, ECFC EVs act on target cells show a positive effect on these diseases
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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