Abstract 349: Gene Regulatory Modules Regulate Cardiac Lineage Specification Revealed by Single-cell Rna Sequencing

Background: The molecular definition of the differentiation process is of intense interest for cardiovascular developmental biologists. With the advent of single cell technologies, a number of a transcriptomic approaches have been developed to obtain a complete description of gene expression. While single cell RNA sequencing is a significant advance for describing gene expression at the cellular resolution, novel obstacles have emerged such as computational management of dropout events, discovery of the gene regulatory modules responsible for lineage specification and identification of novel lineage markers. Methods: Using Etv2- and Nkx2-5 EYFP transgenic embryos, from which progenitors of hematopoietic, endothelial and cardiac lineages can be isolated with high purity, we performed single cell transcriptome analysis. We developed a Bayesian statistical framework to (1) model the dropout events, (2) reconstruct the lineage specification pathways from mesodermal progenitors to hematopoietic, endothelial an...