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Biomedical subjects

Keith Youker

Publications and source records attributed to Keith Youker.

2 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2025

Transcription factor 4 maintains endothelial cell identity by inhibiting endothelial to mesenchymal transition.

Endothelial to mesenchymal transition (EndoMT) is essential for embryonic heart development and contributes to many pathological processes. It is unclear how the balance between endothelial cell (EC) identity and EndoMT mediators is regulated to drive this transition. This study identifies transcription factor 4 (TCF4; also known as ITF2) as a critical EC identity gene. TCF4 knockdown impairs EC phenotype and function, and induces a transition towards a mesenchymal-like state. This discovery suggests that TCF4 safeguards EC identity against EndoMT. Mechanistically, TCF4 directly binds to the promoter of multiple key genes in the transforming growth factor-β (TGFβ) signaling pathway, thereby repressing their expression. TCF4 expression is consistently down-regulated in three EndoMT models. TCF4 down-regulation diminishes its inhibitory effect on the TGFβ signaling pathway, leading to pathway activation and subsequently enhancing EndoMT. This, in turn, further suppresses TCF4 expression. Consequently, the TCF4-TGFβ feedback loop is formed to intensify the EndoMT process. We demonstrate that introducing exogenous TCF4 disrupts this TCF4-TGFβ feedback loop of EndoMT, rescuing the EC phenotype and function under TGFβ stimulation, as well as ECs from human patients with heart failure. Our results reveal a key role for TCF4 in safeguarding EC identity and preventing EndoMT, suggesting a therapeutic potential of targeting TCF4 for EndoMT-related cardiovascular diseases.

Humans↗
PubMed2025

Single-Cell Splicing Isoform Atlas of the Adult Human Heart and Heart Failure.

BACKGROUND: Alternative splicing plays crucial roles in normal heart development and cardiac disease by influencing protein-coding sequences, functional domains, and molecular networks. However, a detailed characterization of the human heart isoform landscape remains incomplete. METHODS: Leveraging long-read single-nucleus RNA sequencing and computational analysis, we dissected full-length isoform heterogeneities, expression patterns, and usage shifts across cell types, cell states, and cardiac conditions of the adult left ventricle. We applied in silico approaches to assess the functional relevance of identified isoforms; validated isoform compositions of representative cardiac genes using reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction and targeted amplicon sequencing; and developed a web server for interactive navigation of our results. RESULTS: The data revealed that isoform heterogeneity is widespread in the cardiac cellular system, serving as a posttranscriptional buffer mechanism that calibrates the molecule reservoirs in human hearts. In healthy left ventricles, ≈30% of cell type-specific genes were polyform, using multiple isoforms tailored to cell type-specific programs. Among ubiquitously expressed genes, >300 showed differential isoform usage with cell type specificity in normal hearts. Comparisons of cardiomyocytes across conditions uncovered 379 genes with marked isoform usage shifts, most of which are predicted to change protein coding outcomes through direct changes in protein coding sequences and switches between intron retention and non-protein-coding biotypes. In contrast, cell state-specific programs tend to operate on monoform genes associated with changes among cell states. In addition, our data revealed heart failure-associated differential isoform usage events in stromal and immune cell types in the cardiac microenvironment. CONCLUSIONS: We present a comprehensive atlas of splicing isoforms in the normal adult heart and heart failure through long-read single-nucleus RNA sequencing and computational analyses. The results suggest crucial roles of isoforms in buffering core cellular programs and contributing to disease-associated cell states. The full-length details of these cell-specific isoforms serve as an important reference for downstream translational and mechanistic studies and are available on our online data portal at https://github.com/gaolabtools/heart-isoform-atlas.

Humans↗