They also show that similar processes could exist in mammals, including humans, suggesting that activating neural crest cells in the heart could treat damage caused by heart attacks and related conditions. These results provide new insights into the repair and healing of damaged heart muscle in fish. Further results showed that the contribution of neural crest cells to the heart is controlled by the same genes during both the growth of the embryonic heart and the repair of the adult heart. The experiments revealed that neural crest cells contribute to heart tissue in developing birds and mammals and help repair the heart in adult zebrafish. used cell biology techniques to track neural crest cells in living animals. To address these questions, Tang, Martik et al. However, it was unclear whether this is also the case for birds or mammals or whether neural crest cells have any roles in the regeneration of the adult heart after injury in fish and amphibians. The heart ventricle is one of the tissues to which neural crest cells contribute during embryonic development in fish and amphibians. Due to their contributions to diverse organs and tissues, neural crest cells are very important for healthy development. These cells migrate extensively during development to form many different parts of the body. Neural crest cells are a group of these stem cells found in all animals with backbones (i.e. Thus, understanding molecular mechanisms that control the normal development of the neural crest into cardiomyocytes and reactivation of the neural crest program upon regeneration may open potential therapeutic approaches to repair heart damage in amniotes.īefore birth, unspecialized stem cells go through a process called differentiation to form the many types of cells found in the adult. The results suggest that neural crest cells contribute to many cardiovascular structures including cardiomyocytes across vertebrates and to the regenerating heart of teleost fish. Whereas the adult heart has few sox10+ cells in the apex, sox10 and other neural crest regulatory network genes are upregulated in the regenerating myocardium after resection. To test the intriguing possibility that neural crest cells contribute to heart repair, we examined Danio rerio adult heart regeneration in the neural crest transgenic line, Tg(−4.9sox10:eGFP). Using replication incompetent avian retroviruses for precise high-resolution lineage analysis, we uncover a previously undescribed neural crest contribution to cardiomyocytes of the ventricles in Gallus gallus, supported by Wnt1-Cre lineage analysis in Mus musculus. Cardiac neural crest cells contribute to important portions of the cardiovascular system including the aorticopulmonary septum and cardiac ganglion.