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Lofty Thought of the Day
- Category: Science & Technology
by Andy Coghlan NewScientist.comBeating heart muscle cells have for the first time been made directly from other heart cells. The breakthrough may enable damaged heart muscle to be repaired by converting the structural cells called fibroblasts into the cardiomyocytes that make the heart beat.
The route from fibroblasts to cardiomyocytes is so direct that no transitory stem cellsMovie Camera need to be formed in the process, avoiding the extra step by which many other researchers are trying to create heart cells from patients' own cells, or from human embryonic stem cells.
"Other teams, including ours, have spent significant effort making cardiomyoctes from stem cells for regenerative purposes," says Deepak Srivastava of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in San Francisco.
Change of heart
Now Srivastava and his team have created mouse cardiomyocytes by exposing mouse fibroblasts to three transcription factor proteins called Gata4, Mef2c and Tbx5 that activate genes needed for the formation of embryonic heart tissue. "The fibroblasts started to convert within a few days and continued to make the transition to cardiomyocytes over several weeks, beating at about one month," Srivastava says.
The team also transplanted treated fibroblasts into the hearts of live mice, where they developed into cardiomyocytes.
Next, Srivastava's team will see if the process works on human fibroblasts. They will also hunt for ways to morph fibroblasts without having to first infect them with a virus – which is how the transcription factors were transported to the mouse fibroblasts...MORE...
