Scleraxis over‐expression promotes the cardiac myofibroblast phenotype (1152.13)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Myofibroblasts are the primary mediators of cardiac remodeling, and their persistence in the myocardium is implicated in the development of fibrosis. Thus, inhibiting myofibroblast differentiation represents a novel approach for treating cardiac fibrosis. Scleraxis is a transcription factor required for development of collagen rich tissues. Interestingly, the same stimuli that induce differentiation also cause increased scleraxis levels in vitro and in vivo. Thus, we hypothesized that scleraxis promotes the myofibroblast phenotype. To test this, we over‐expressed scleraxis via adenovirus in primary cardiac fibroblasts (CFs) and measured changes in key myofibroblast markers. We observed that scleraxis over‐expression in CFs caused increased mRNA and protein levels of these markers. Since myofibroblasts are also distinguished from fibroblasts by their contractility, we used a contraction assay to determine the functional implications of increased marker levels. We found that over‐expressing scleraxis in CFs caused a significant increase in contraction. However, over‐expression of a dominant negative DNA binding‐deficient scleraxis mutant did not induce contraction, indicating a requirement for intact scleraxis. These results demonstrate that scleraxis promotes the cardiac myofibroblast phenotype, implicating scleraxis as a potential target for the intervention of cardiac fibrosis. Grant Funding Source : Supported by Canadian Institute of Healthy Research, St. Boniface Hospital Foundation
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".