Hearty Beginnings

Your heart pumps around 6000 litres of blood around your body every day. This powerful muscle begins life as a tube made from cells called the first (FHF) and second heart fields (SHF). Researchers imaged sections through the developing mouse heart (pictured) to probe what these cells get up to, from early stages of constructing a primitive structure called the cardiac crescent (red cells) to the production of specialised cardiac tissue (green cells). Fluorescently labelling and live imaging FHF and SHF cells revealed three phases dominated by different activities – differentiation, where cells become specialised, and morphogenesis, where cells organise into shapes. First, FHF cells rapidly differentiated and formed the cardiac crescent. Next, differentiation stopped and the crescent transformed into a heart tube. Finally, differentiation picked up again as SHF cells became specialised. Differentiation and morphogenesis therefore take turns in a coordinated dance to construct the beginnings of a heart.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image adapted from work by Kenzo Ivanovitch, Susana Temiño and Miguel Torres
• Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares, Spain
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, December 2017