Year 2

We continued our work in improving the yield of pacemaking cells from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) that can be used to engineer biopacemakers. The ion channel isoform responsible for the induced membrane potential changes in hiPSCs and their differentiating cardiac progeny was determined. We focused on optimizing the duration and the timing of membrane potential manipulation in improving the efficiency of pro-pacemaking cardiac progenitor cells and pacemaking cells.