Revitalizing Our View of Heart Development

The paper by Kelly et al., from Margaret Buckingham's group at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, changed the way we think about the developing mammalian heart, as well as the origins of congenital heart disease. Prior to this work, classical studies showing that the heart tube grows in part by the transformation of a noncardiac epithelium into cardiomyocytes had lapsed into obscurity. Kelly et al. and other papers have reinstated the notion that heart growth and morphogenesis are highly dynamic and driven by the recruitment of multipotent heart progenitor cells to a primitive scaffold. It was as if a light went on in the heart development field. This and subsequent work, much of it from Buckingham and colleagues, allows us to understand the cellular and molecular nature of heart growth and to see the origins of congenital heart disease in the aberrant behavior of progenitor cell populations.This PaperPick refers to “The Arterial Pole of the Mouse Heart Forms from Fgf10-Expressing Cells in Pharyngeal Mesoderm,” by R.G. Kelly, N.A. Brown, and M.E. Buckingham, published in September 2001.Video AbstractRobert Kelly discusses the historical context for the work, outlines how research into the second heart field has progressed in the interim, and highlights the evolutionary and biomedical implications of the resulting changes in our understanding of cardiac development