Tissue specific analysis of the zebrafish heart regeneration response.
Final Report Abstract
Ischemic heart disease is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. In contrast to mammalian species including humans, zebrafish can replace lost cardiac tissue by complete epimorphic regeneration. During my time as a DFG fellow, I worked on the identification of the underlying molecular pathways, allowing zebrafish myocardium to induce proliferation. I developed a zebrafish exercise setup and found that exercise, like injury induces myocardial proliferation in vivo. I compared expression profiles of both, exercised hearts and injured hearts. This dataset allowed me to specifically identify those genes directly involved in the cell cycle of cardiomyocytes in zebrafish and additionally 3 independent pathways which activation accompanies cell cycle induction. Further, I developed a novel transgenic imaging system for myocardial myofibril imaging in the zebrafish and was able to identify the dilated cardiomyopathy related receptor ERBB2 as a major remodeling factor of the contractile machinery in ventricular cardiomyocytes.
Publications
- High-resolution reconstruction of the beating zebrafish heart. Nature Methods 2014 Sep;11(9):919-22
M. Mickoleit, B. Schmid, M. Weber, F.O. Fahrbach, S. Hombach, S. Reischauer, J. Huisken
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1038/NMETH.3037) - In vivo imaging of actin dynamics identifies Erbb2 signaling as a major actin and sarcomere remodeling factor in ventricular cardiomyocytes. Circulation Research 2014 Oct 24;115(10):845-56
Reischauer S., Arnaout R., Stainier DY
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.115.304356)
