Today our attention
turns to heart disease, one of the leading cause of death in the
world. Upon heart attack, cardiomyocytes, or the heart muscle cells
die off, and this loss is irreversible. As time passes, the lack of
heart muscle stresses the organ finally leading to failure. On the
other hand, zebrafish posses extraordinary capacity to recover from
strong cardiac trauma. We talk to two scientists, Chi-Chung Wu from
Ulm University and Jingli Cao from Duke University, who have recently
shown how the zebrafish is capable of doing so.
Both the studies
share certain commonalities:
Firstly, in order to
understand the system they both use novel cutting edge methodology to
look at RNA – the middle man between DNA, the information component
of the cell, and protein, the functional component of the cell. While
Chi-Chung probes the RNA landscape to find genes involved within the
heart cells at the injury site, Jingli looks at RNA content within
single cells of the epicardium, a sheet covering the heart wall.
Secondly, both
authors find factors that are dispensible for development, but become
initiated by tissue damage and are necessary for successful recovery.
One might think the extraordinary capacity of the zebrafish to
regenerate its organs might lie in such genetic differences
post-injury. To learn more about the process, please listen to the podcast.
To know more about the work, please read the articles:
Wu, Kruse et al., Developmental Cell, 2016, 36-1: p36–49.
Single epicardial cell transcriptome sequencing identifies Caveolin 1 as an essential factor in zebrafish heart regeneration.
Cao et al., Development, 2016 143: 232-243.
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