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Ventricular myocardium development and the role of connexins in the human fetal heart

Pervolaraki, E; Dachtler, J; Anderson, RA; Holden, AV

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Authors

E Pervolaraki

J Dachtler

RA Anderson

AV Holden



Abstract

The developmental timeline of the human heart remains elusive. The heart takes on its characteristic four chambered appearance by ~56 days gestational age (DGA). However, owing to the complexities (both technical and logistical) of exploring development in utero, we understand little of how the ventricular walls develop. To address this, we employed diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging to explore the architecture and tissue organization of the developing heart aged 95–143 DGA. We show that fractional anisotropy increases (from ~0.1 to ~0.5), diffusion coefficients decrease (from ~1 × 10−3mm2/sec to ~0.4 × 10−3mm2/sec), and fiber paths, extracted by tractography, increase linearly with gestation, indicative of the increasing organization of the ventricular myocytes. By 143 DGA, the developing heart has the classical helical organization observed in mature mammalian tissue. This was accompanied by an increase in connexin 43 and connexin 40 expression levels, suggesting their role in the development of the ventricular conduction system and that electrical propagation across the heart is facilitated in later gestation. Our findings highlight a key developmental window for the structural organization of the fetal heart.

Citation

Pervolaraki, E., Dachtler, J., Anderson, R., & Holden, A. (2017). Ventricular myocardium development and the role of connexins in the human fetal heart. Scientific Reports, 7(1), Article 12272. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-11129-9

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Aug 18, 2017
Online Publication Date Sep 25, 2017
Publication Date Sep 25, 2017
Deposit Date Oct 9, 2017
Publicly Available Date Oct 9, 2017
Journal Scientific Reports
Publisher Nature Research
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 7
Issue 1
Article Number 12272
DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-11129-9
Related Public URLs http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-11129-9

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.





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