TY - JOUR
T1 - Initial characterization of Wnt-Tcf functions during Ciona heart development
AU - Kaplan, Nicole A.
AU - Wang, Wei
AU - Christiaen, Lionel
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Antonietta Spagnuolo for kindly sharing constructs and we thank Dylan Iannitelli for technical assistance. This work was funded by an NIH/NHLBI R01 award HL108643 to L.C. a trans-Atlantic network of excellence award 15CVD01 from the Leducq Foundation to L.C. and award 5T32HD007520-14 to N.K. as part of the New York University Developmental Genetics program.
Funding Information:
We thank Antonietta Spagnuolo for kindly sharing constructs and we thank Dylan Iannitelli for technical assistance. This work was funded by an NIH / NHLBI R01 award HL108643 to L.C., a trans-Atlantic network of excellence award 15CVD01 from the Leducq Foundation to L.C., and award 5T32HD007520-14 to N.K. as part of the New York University Developmental Genetics program.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Elsevier Inc.
PY - 2019/4/15
Y1 - 2019/4/15
N2 - In vertebrate embryos, the cardiopharyngeal mesoderm gives rise to both cardiac and branchiomeric head muscles. The canonical Wnt signaling pathway regulates many aspects of cardiomyocyte specification, and modulates a balance between skeletal and cardiac myogenesis during vertebrate head muscle development. However, the role of Wnt signaling during ascidian cardiopharyngeal development remains elusive. Here, we documented the expression of Wnt pathway components during cardiopharyngeal development in Ciona, and generated tools to investigate potential roles for Wnt signaling, and its transcriptional effector Tcf, on heart vs. pharyngeal muscle fate specification. Neither focused functional analyses nor lineage-specific transcriptome profiling uncovered a significant role for Tcf during early cardiac vs. pharyngeal muscle fate choice. By contrast, Wnt gene expression patterns of Frizzled4 and Lrp4/8 and CRISPR/Cas9-mediated Tcf knock-down suggested a later requirement for Wnt signaling during heart morphogenesis and/or cardiomyocyte differentiation. This study provides a provisional set of reagents to study Wnt signaling function in Ciona, and promising insights for future analyses of Wnt functions during heart organogenesis.
AB - In vertebrate embryos, the cardiopharyngeal mesoderm gives rise to both cardiac and branchiomeric head muscles. The canonical Wnt signaling pathway regulates many aspects of cardiomyocyte specification, and modulates a balance between skeletal and cardiac myogenesis during vertebrate head muscle development. However, the role of Wnt signaling during ascidian cardiopharyngeal development remains elusive. Here, we documented the expression of Wnt pathway components during cardiopharyngeal development in Ciona, and generated tools to investigate potential roles for Wnt signaling, and its transcriptional effector Tcf, on heart vs. pharyngeal muscle fate specification. Neither focused functional analyses nor lineage-specific transcriptome profiling uncovered a significant role for Tcf during early cardiac vs. pharyngeal muscle fate choice. By contrast, Wnt gene expression patterns of Frizzled4 and Lrp4/8 and CRISPR/Cas9-mediated Tcf knock-down suggested a later requirement for Wnt signaling during heart morphogenesis and/or cardiomyocyte differentiation. This study provides a provisional set of reagents to study Wnt signaling function in Ciona, and promising insights for future analyses of Wnt functions during heart organogenesis.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.ydbio.2018.12.018
DO - 10.1016/j.ydbio.2018.12.018
M3 - Article
C2 - 30635127
AN - SCOPUS:85059581334
SN - 0012-1606
VL - 448
SP - 199
EP - 209
JO - Developmental Biology
JF - Developmental Biology
IS - 2
ER -