Heart Pressed

Standing in a dense crowd, a nudge here and a shove there are signals to shuffle over, make way, or stand your ground. And a new study has shown that at the molecular level, physical pressures can have a similar effect. During early heart development, two types of tissue grow separately, but in tandem: the muscle and the inner lining. Studying the hearts of various zebrafish (pictured in different colours to highlight particular factors at play), they found that the increasing pressure from expanding muscle tissue prompts chemical signals that encourage the lining to keep growing. The lining only slows when the pressure eases off – showing that a physical feedback loop is instigating important biochemical signals, a form of communication not previously seen. If this push and pull method of communication exists in other organs, it may reveal new details of how we grow, and even how diseases take hold.

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 Dorothee Bornhorst and colleagues
• Institute of Biochemistry and Biology, Potsdam University, Potsdam, Germany
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Nature Communications, September 2019