Skinny Heart

A heart that burns with passion is the very essence of vitality, but a heart that burns with infection is quite often deadly. Indeed, inflammation of the heart – myocarditis – causes over 20 percent of cases of sudden cardiac death. Coxsackie B viruses are responsible for about half of myocarditis cases, but studying how these pathogens infect and reproduce in heart cells is hampered by the limited supply of fresh healthy human heart cells, which are difficult to obtain. Procuring skin cells, on the other hand, is easy. And thankfully, scientists have figured out a way to convert human skin cells into heart cells in culture. The ex-skin cell pictured exhibits structural proteins (green) characteristic of a heart cell and was readily infected with Coxsackie virus (red). Cells like this one will be invaluable for studying how the viruses infect the heart and how to stop them before they kill.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image by Joseph C. Wu and colleagues
• Stanford University School of Medicine, USA
• Copyright held by the American Heart Association
• Research published in Circulation Research, February 2015