Direct reprogramming of smooth muscle cells from HGPS patients revealed that BMP4 is a key contributor of vascular degeneration and might represent a new therapeutic target.
High resolution in vivo imaging of the zebrafish heart morphogenesis allows quantitative testing of the impact of stretch sensitive channels during outflow tract valve development.
Identification of a novel source of progenitor cells that form arterial valve leaflets and that, when disrupted, can lead to bicuspid arterial valve, the most common human cardiac malformation.
Tissue-level coordination of cardiac progenitor cells in the early mouse embryo produces a temporal compartmentalization of differentiation and morphogenesis essential for heart tube formation.
Lineage analysis reveals that cardiac neural crest contributes to cardiomyocytes across vertebrates and consistent with this, the neural crest gene regulatory program is reactivated upon heart regeneration in zebrafish.
Early postmortem autopsy of COVID-19 patients shows high viral loads and damage of the lung, although extrapulmonary cells demonstrate no injury, they contribute to inflammation, hyper-coagulation, and multiple organ dysfunction.
The transcription factor GATA6 selects the embryonic vessels that will be reorganized into the major thoracic arteries by promoting local differentiation of vascular smooth muscle cells.
Brain natriuretic peptide supplementation can increase cardiac neovascularization in infarcted hearts by stimulating endogenous endothelial cell proliferation and proliferation of precursor cells, which will differentiate into endothelial cells.
