Heart regeneration
Severe cardiac injury in the mammalian heart, such as a myocardial infarction, leads to a significant loss of cardiomyocytes, which are not replaced. The loss of contractile cells and the inability of the adult mammalian heart to regenerate is a major cause of cardiac dysfunction and heart failure. Unlike mammals, the zebrafish is very efficient in regenerating the injured heart. After injury, cardiomyocyte proliferation is induced until all lost cardiomyocytes are replaced. We want to understand the mechanism and the signals that induce cardiomyocyte proliferation in the zebrafish heart. For this, we have used tomo-seq to identify and characterize the proliferating cardiomyocytes located at the wound border site. Currently we are using new transgenic approaches to mark and isolate the proliferating cardiomyocytes and we generate single-cell transcriptomics and regulomics data to identify the mechanisms inducing cell cycle re-entry.