Although animals such as zebrafish and newborn mice retain the ability to regenerate the heart post-injury, adult mammalians have largely lost this cardiac regenerative capacity. Consequently, a patient will irreversibly lose as many as a billion cardiomyocytes following a heart attack and suffer from permanently reduced cardiac function. Today, nearly five million Americans live with heart failure—this underscores the significance of our inability to regenerate myocardial tissue.
Most mammalian cardiomyocytes lose their proliferative and regenerative abilities because they undergo binucleation, terminal differentiation, and permanent withdrawal from the cell cycle postnatally. The mechanisms which control this transition, however, are still not fully understood. In fact,... Read More