Head Over Heart

The rhythmic beat of our heart is fine-tuned by an orchestra of electrical and chemical signals from surrounding nerve cells. But how these neural signals influence heart development and maintenance remains unclear. The human heart is complex (both biologically and emotionally!), so researchers have turned to a more simple comparator: the sea squirt, Ciona robusta. The C. robusta heart (pictured, with muscle architecture in pink) grows throughout adulthood and has a line of progenitor cells that act as a reserve for further growth. A team tracked these cells over time and found that neural inputs control not just heartbeat, but how many heart muscle cells are produced during development. Understanding the subtle signals that guide heart formation could shed light on the nervous system’s wider role in healthy organ growth and repair.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Hannah N. Gruner and C. J. Pickett, and colleagues
• Department of Biology, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Biology, April 2026