Regenerative medicine and stem cell research go hand-in-hand when it comes to dreaming up future cures for human diseases. Stem cells hold the key to allow different types of damaged or diseased tissues to regenerate, and understanding the details of this regeneration process is very important. Today’s image is from a recent Development paper discussing how damaged heart tissue regenerates in zebrafish, and serves as a great model for devising strategies to help human heart attack patients.
When a person suffers a heart attack, many of the cells within the heart are injured. White blood cells move into the injured area of the heart and create scar tissue. This scar tissue is important to maintain the structural integrity of the heart, but causes long-term changes in the heart’s architecture that may lead to heart failure. A recent paper in the journal Development looks at this process in zebrafish, a small fish frequently used in developmental and cell biology studies. In this paper, researchers caused injury to the zebrafish heart similar to that seen in humans after a heart attack. Scar tissue developed after this injury, but this scar tissue was later replaced with healthy tissue. This amazing ability of the zebrafish heart to regenerate healthy heart muscle gives researchers further insight into how this process may be engineered for human patients after suffering heart attacks.
The images above show zebrafish heart tissue after injury (dpi = days post-injury), with bottom images showing higher magnification views of the boxed regions. The injured area (IA) can be seen as the area lacking red, which shows healthy heart tissue. Shortly after injury (A), the presence of the green cells at the border of the injury indicates the presence of platelet cells, which promote scar formation. After a few days, the presence of green cells in the injured area (B,C) indicates the presence of scar tissue. Many days after injury (D), the lack of green cells shows that the scar tissue has been removed as the heart tissue regenerated.
For a more scientifically detailed description of this image, check out my post on The Node, the community forum for and by developmental biologists.
