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(Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology. 2009;29:1823.)
© 2009 American Heart Association, Inc.

Integrative Physiology/Experimental Medicine

Somitovasculin, a Novel Endothelial-Specific Transcript Involved in the Vasculature Development

Devi Mariappan; Rabea Niemann; Martin Gajewski; Johannes Winkler; Shuhua Chen; Suma Choorapoikayil; Marco Bitzer; Herbert Schulz; Jürgen Hescheler; Agapios Sachinidis

From the Center of Physiology and Pathophysiology, Institute of Neurophysiology, and Center of Molecular Medicine (D.M., R.N., J.W., S.C., J.H., A.S.), and the Institute for Genetics (R.N., M.G., S.C., M.B.), University of Cologne, Germany; and the Max-Delbrueck-Center for Molecular Medicine - MDC (H.S.), Berlin, Germany.

Correspondence to Prof Dr A. Sachinidis, University of Cologne, Center of Physiology and Pathophysiology, Institute of Neurophysiology, Robert Koch Str 39, 50931 Cologne, Germany. E-mail a.sachinidis{at}uni-koeln.de

Objective— We recently isolated and characterized endothelial-like CD31⁺ cells derived from mouse embryonic stem (mES) cells and identified their transcriptome. The main objective of this study was to determine the functional relevance of the transcripts of unknown function (TUF) for vasculature development.

Methods and Results— We selected 2 TUFs of more than 27 to study their role for blood vessel development in zebrafish. Morpholino (MO) knockdown of the zebrafish orthologs of the first TUF (TUF1, mouse cDNA BC022623) showed disruption of the intersegmental vessels (ISV) at 2 days postfertilization as observed by live imaging of fli:EGFP-transgenic embryos. The morphants showed abnormal blood circulation, but no effect on hematopoiesis was observed as demonstrated by gata-1 in situ hybridizations. Because knockdown of TUF1 resulted in disruption of the ISV patterning we named the TUF1 somitovasculin. TUF2 has been identified as cDNA clone BC020535. The MO knockdown of TUF2 resulted in a phenotype with an enlarged heart and the embryos lacked circulation completely.

Conclusion— We have shown the participation of a novel transcript (named somitovasculin) in circulatory vessel development. The combination of expression profiling in differentiating mES cells and the zebrafish model has the potential for rapid identification and functional characterization of TUFs.

Key Words: transcripts with unknown function • intersegmental vessel • morpholino-knockdown • CD31⁺ cells • vasculature development • zebrafish