The development of vascular system in vertebrates has been traditionally explained by early vasculogenic assembly of angioblasts followed by angiogenic outgrowth of pre-existing vessels. The discovery of adult endothelial progenitor cells (Asahara et al. in Science 275(5302):964-967, 1997) challenged this view, since postnatal vascular growth could be accomplished by recruitment of circulating cells with the ability to differentiate into endothelial cells. However, the existence of embryonic circulating endothelial progenitor cells and their actual contribution to vascular development is far less known. We review in this paper the literature concerning the features, origin and physiological functions of embryonic and foetal circulating endothelial progenitors. Our review includes the early (E7.5) progenitors isolated from yolk sac, the hematovascular progenitors identified in the foetal liver, the yolk sac-derived erythro-myeloid progenitors, circulating hematopoietic cells from the G2-GATA4 lineage and the endothelial colony-forming cells isolated from the placenta and umbilical cord blood. We highlight the need of further characterization of these populations and the relationships between them.
Keywords: Endothelial colony-forming cells; Endothelial progenitor cells; Vascular growth; Vasculogenesis.