Somitovasculin, a novel endothelial-specific transcript involved in the vasculature development.

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.