The generation of a patient-specific hiPSC-cardiomyocyte model with a KCNQ1 truncating mutation and its isogenic control provides a platform to study the genetic mechanisms of arrhythmia-induced cardiomyopathy.
KCNQ1 functions as a slow rectifying potassium channel during the repolarization of the cardiac action potential, with mutations causing long-QT syndrome 1 and arrhythmias. A genetic link between KCNQ1 mutations and arrhythmia-induced cardiomyopathy (AIC) has not been identified, and the underlying pathways remain elusive. We generated human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) from an AIC patient harboring the heterozygous truncating mutation p.W15* in KCNQ1 and corrected the mutation to wildtype using CRISPR/Cas9. The hiPSCs retained full pluripotency, genomic integrity, and differentiation ability. They were differentiated into hiPSC-cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CM), establishing a patient-specific model to explore potential genetic connections to AIC.
Anders et al. (Tue,) studied this question.