Scienceblogtwo

Research led by Jan Philipp Junker and Daniela Panáková at the MDC suggests that zebrafish may be able to heal damaged cardiac tissue. Cardiomyocytes, the cells that make up the heart muscle, suffer damage from a lack of oxygen and start to die when a person has a heart attack and does not receive timely medical attention. Since we are unable to produce new cardiomyocytes, scar tissue develops and the heart's ability to pump is reduced. Lower vertebrates, like the zebrafish, which can regenerate organs including its heart, experience a fundamentally different world. Professor Jan Philipp Junker, head of the Quantitative Developmental Biology Lab at the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology (BIMSB), a division of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC) in Berlin, says, "We wanted to find out how this little fish does that, and if we could learn from it. With the assistance of Dr. Daniela Panáková, who is the director of the Elect...