WIKIMEDIA, MAKLUMAT IANJUTThe mammalian heart has a slight capacity for regeneration—about one percent of cardiac muscle cells turn over each year. Although such cells are of big interest to scientists developing cardiac therapies, their identity has remained mysterious. Researchers reported in Nature this week (June 22) that they have finally pinned down these proliferating cardiomyocytes in mice.
“For decades, researchers have been trying to find the specialized cells that make new muscle cells in the adult heart, and we think that we have found that cell,” Hesham Sadek, the senior author of the study and a researcher at UT Southwestern Medical Center, said in a press release. “This cell does not appear to be a stem cell, but rather a specialized cardiomyocyte, or heart muscle cell, that can divide, which the majority of cardiomyocytes cannot do.”
Previous studies suggested that the progenitor cells likely live in a hypoxic environment, so Sadek’s team developed a fate-mapping technique that could track the life of hypoxic cardiomyocytes and their daughter cells.
“We identify a rare population of hypoxic cardiomyocytes that display characteristics of proliferative neonatal ...
