Effects of Acute and Chronic Type I Interferon Stimulation on Human Cardiomyocytes

Persistent type I interferon activity is a hallmark of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and contributes to extra-renal organ injury, yet the temporal transcriptomic response of human cardiomyocytes has not been mapped. To address this gap, AC16 ventricular cardiomyocytes were stimulated with recombinant IFN-α (1 000 U mL⁻¹) under three time courses: a single 24 h pulse (acute), a 24 h pulse followed by a 5-day recovery (chronic-hold), and two 24 h pulses separated by a 4-day recovery (repeat). Triplicate RNA-seq profiles captured robust induction of canonical interferon-stimulated genes immediately after exposure, whereas expression largely returned to baseline after the recovery periods, indicating that the cardiomyocyte interferon response is transient rather than self-sustaining. The dataset comprises raw FASTQ files, md5 checksums, gene-level count tables, and TPM matrices, providing a reference for benchmarking innate immune–cardiac interactions, validating bioinformatic pipelines, and integrating multi-omics studies. Proteomic and metabolomic measurements from the same biological replicates are being deposited separately in public repositories and can be cross-referenced to extend analyses of interferon kinetics.