the heart is the first organ to develop but despite its importance scientists know surprisingly little about exactly how its cells are organized now a team of researchers have combined two Cutting Edge Technologies to map the heart in more detail than ever before building a heart [Music] Atlas a healthy heart has four chambers two atria and two ventricles and congenital variation in these structures are the most common birth defects and can be fatal understanding how the communities of cells whi
ch make up the heart's functional structures organize could provide key insights into how defects like this arise and that is precisely what this team have done successfully mapping the communities of cells that make up the human heart even identifying some of the ways they communicate to do this they combined two techniques first they used single cell RNA sequencing to look for genetic markers that identified different cell types this gave them a list of the different cell types that made up pa
rts of the heart but no information about where these cells occurred in the actual organ for that they needed Cutting Edge imaging technology called multiplexed error robust fluorescent insitu hybridization or Mish it's a complex name but what the technique allows researchers to do is create an image of the heart with such high resolution that individual RNA molecules could be identified and spatially mapped and by mapping the RNA they could map individual genes and first identify cells and then
communities and subcommunities of cells what you get is an atlas a map of the cell types in their correct location in this slice of a human heart looking closer the te identified the cell communities the groups of cells in communication with each other that organized into the different regions of the heart each region can be thought of like a neighborhood with different combinations of cells that live there and interact with each other in different ways this is the community of cells that make
up an outflow tract where blood moves into the arteries and here are the cells that make up the left atrium let's take a closer look at one of the more complex regions The ventricle here we see cardiomyocytes the working muscle of the heart are arranged into layers across the wall of The ventricle the different colors of the Mish image highlighting the different types of cells and the resolution of the map is so good that the team were also able to identify an intermediate community of cells in
the heart wall that was previously not known about but they learned more than simply which cells end up where they were also able to investigate the process by which they organize they saw proteins expressed which are known to be used by C to communicate and by modeling those interactions could come up with a prediction of how the organization worked in the heart further confirming this using Mouse models and an inv vitro approach 3D printing layers of cardiomyocytes exposing them to different p
roteins and observing how they responded organizing into the kinds of structures seen in their study this breakthrough in the understand understanding of how the heart grows could have a huge impact on our ability to identify and treat congenital heart defects but it could also lead to safer drug testing and even open the door to lab grown replacement heart [Music] tissue
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