Spatial transcriptomics reveals novel genes during the remodelling of the embryonic human arterial valves

by Rachel Queen, Moira Crosier, Lorraine Eley, Janet Kerwin, Jasmin E. Turner, Jianshi Yu, Ahlam Alqahtani, Tamilvendhan Dhanaseelan, Lynne Overman, Hannah Soetjoadi, Richard Baldock, Jonathan Coxhead, Veronika Boczonadi, Alex Laude, Simon J. Cockell, Maureen A. Kane, Steven Lisgo, Deborah J. Henderson Abnormalities of the arterial valves, including bicuspid aortic valve (BAV) are amongst the most common congenital defects and are a significant cause of morbidity as well as predisposition to disease in later life. Despite this, and compounded by their small size and relative inaccessibility, there is still much to understand about how the arterial valves form and remodel during embryogenesis, both at the morphological and genetic level. Here we set out to address this in human embryos, using Spatial Transcriptomics (ST). We show that ST can be used to investigate the transcriptome of the developing arterial valves, circumventing the problems of accurately dissecting out these tiny structures from the developing embryo. We show that the transcriptome of CS16 and CS19 arterial valves overlap considerably, despite being several days apart in terms of human gestation, and that expression data confirm that the great majority of the most differentially expressed genes are valve-specific. Moreover, we show that the transcriptome of the human arterial valves overlaps with that of mouse atrioventricular valves from a range of gestations, validating our dataset but also highlighting n...
Source: PLoS Genetics - Category: Genetics & Stem Cells Authors: Source Type: research