Watch: Moment heart begins to form captured for first time
Scientists have for the first time captured the moment a heart begins to form from embryonic stem cells.
In astonishing footage, heart cells were seen starting to organise themselves into an organ-like shape just a few hours after they had divided from stem cells.
The time-lapse images were captured by University College London (UCL) and the Francis Crick Institute, using the advanced light-sheet microscopy technique on a living model of a mouse embryo.
The method uses a thin sheet of light to illuminate and take detailed pictures of tiny samples, creating clear 3D images without causing any damage to living tissue.
The images capture a critical moment in development, gastrulation, when the soup of new cells that begin dividing after conception start to specialise and move to their correct places in the emerging foetus.
In a human it happens around two weeks after pregnancy begins.
Being able to see the heart forming so early could allow scientists to understand how congenital defects occur, and how to stop them.
Senior author Dr Kenzo Ivanovitch, of UCL's Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, said: 'This is the first time we've been able to watch heart cells this closely, for this long, during mammalian development.
'We first had to reliably grow the embryos in a dish over long periods, from a few hours to a few days, and what we found was totally unexpected.'
Using fluorescent markers, the team tagged heart muscle cells so that they would glow blue, and then took images every two minutes over 40 hours to create a time-lapse.
At the beginning of the process, the cells were capable of becoming various types, but within a few hours heart cells began to differentiate and started behaving in highly organised ways.
Rather than moving randomly, researchers found that they quickly started to follow distinct paths. It was almost as if they already knew where they were going and what role they would play, whether as part of the heart's pumping chambers or in its atria, where blood enters from the body.
'Fundamental change to understanding'
Dr Ivanovitch added: 'Our findings demonstrate that cardiac fate determination and directional cell movement may be regulated much earlier in the embryo than current models suggest.
'This fundamentally changes our understanding of cardiac development by showing that what appears to be chaotic cell migration is actually governed by hidden patterns that ensure proper heart formation.'
Shayma Abukar, the lead author and a doctoral candidate at UCL, said: 'We are now working to understand the signals that co-ordinate this complex choreography of cell movements during early heart development.
'The heart doesn't come from a single group of cells. It forms from a coalition of distinct cell groups that appear at different times and places during gastrulation.'
Insights from the study could revolutionise how scientists understand and treat congenital heart defects, which affect nearly one in 100 babies.
The findings could also accelerate progress in growing heart tissue in the lab for use in regenerative medicine.
Dr Ivanovitch said: 'In the future, we hope this work will help uncover new mechanisms of organ formation. This will inform design principles to precisely program tissue patterns and shapes for tissue engineering.'
The research, which was supported by the British Heart Foundation, was published in the EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organisation) journal.
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