Cardiac fibroblast deletion of PTBP1 modulates the profibrotic response by alternative splicing II

In this project we investigate the role of RNA binding protein PTBP1 in cardiac fibrosis through the conditional deletion of PTBP1 in mouse cardiac fibroblasts and discovered PTBP1 binds to downstream target Fgfr1. We probed FGFR1 in cardiac fibroblasts from C57BL/6 mice by either shRNA mediated global knockdown or overexpression of FGFR1 isoform constucts. We then stimulated cardiac fibroblasts with TGFb to perform deep RNA sequencing studies on the cardiac fibroblast to myofibroblast transformation.