Big Heart

Perhaps having a ‘big heart’ isn’t necessarily a good thing. The bottom row of these mouse hearts show misjudged development from embryo (left three) to post-birth (right three) in the absence of a key enzyme called DOT1L; normal development shown in the top row. Researchers were investigating how the modification of histones, which are proteins that package DNA, impact gene expression during heart development and growth. DOT1L activates a particular histone modification called H3K79me2. With DOT1L removed and the histone modification therefore silenced, they discovered that this modification isn’t a general activator of expression as previously suspected, but specifically regulates two gene networks linked to early left ventricle formation and post-birth cell cycle changes. Mapping the mechanisms that drive gene expression in heart development could not only improve treatments for conditions that arise at birth, but also inform attempts to regenerate hearts following injury later in life.

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 Paola Cattaneo and colleagues
• Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, December 2022