Chamber of Cells

Our hearts – like those of all mammals – have four chambers. The image on the left shows a normal mouse heart, with the left and right atria at the top and the left and right ventricles at the bottom. The right side of the heart pumps blood to the lungs to get oxygen, and the left side of the heart pumps oxygenated blood from the lungs to the body. Congenital heart disease – which affects 9 in every 1,000 newborn babies in the UK – can arise when the chambers of the heart haven’t formed properly. When looking into early heart development, researchers identified stem cells using fluorescent lineage tracing that specifically gave rise to the ventricles of the heart (right). This new insight has helped further our understanding of the heart’s development.

Written by Katie Panteli

Katie Panteli

Writer

Katie, a Warwick Biomed graduate, works for a science-publishing house in London with some of the world's most respected scientific minds. She's most interested in human biology, anything and everything that makes us tick.

• Image courtesy of the Mount Sinai Health System
• Department of Cell, Developmental and Regenerative Biology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA
• Image copyright held by original authors
• Research published in Nature Communications, February 2017