Transcriptome profiling of 3D co-cultured cardiomyocytes and endothelial cells under oxidative stress using a photocrosslinkable hydrogel system

摘要

Myocardial infarction (MI) is one of the most common among cardiovascular diseases. Endothelial cells (ECs) are considered to have protective effects on cardiomyocytes (CMs) under stress conditions such as MI; however, the paracrine CM-EC crosstalk and the resulting endogenous cellular responses that could contribute to this protective effect are not thoroughly investigated. Here we created biomimetic synthetic tissues containing CMs and human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-derived ECs (iECs), which showed improved cell survival compared to single cultures under conditions mimicking the aftermath of MI, and performed high-throughput RNA-sequencing to identify target pathways that could govern CM-iEC crosstalk and the resulting improvement in cell viability. Our results showed that single cultured CMs had different gene expression profiles compared to CMs co-cultured with iECs. More importantly, this gene expression profile was preserved in response to oxidative stress in co-cultured CMs while single cultured CMs showed a significantly different gene expression pattern under stress, suggesting a stabilizing effect of iECs on CMs under oxidative stress conditions. Furthermore, we have validated the in vivo relevance of our engineered model tissues by comparing the changes in the expression levels of several key genes of the encapsulated CMs and iECs with in vivo rat MI model data and clinical data, respectively. We conclude that iECs have protective effects on CMs under oxidative stress through stabilizing mitochondria! complexes, suppressing oxidative phosphorylation pathway and activating pathways such as the drug metabolism-cytochrome P450 pathway, Rap1 signaling pathway, and adrenergic signaling in cardiomyocytes pathway.