Zebrafish have the remarkable and rare ability to regrow and repair their hearts after damage. New research from Caltech and UC Berkeley has identified the circuit of genes controlling this ability and offers clues about how a human heart might someday be repaired after damage, such as a heart attack or in cases of congenital heart defects.
The research was a collaboration between the laboratories of Marianne Bronner, Caltech’s Edward B. Lewis Professor of Biology, director of the Beckman Institute and affiliated faculty member with the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech, and developmental biologist Megan Martik of UC Berkeley. A paper describing the study appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.