Event Date
Megan Martik, Assistant Professor of Genetics, Genomics, Evolution, and Development, University of California, Berkeley, presents "Harnessing the regenerative capacity of the neural crest for cardiac repair".
Megan Martik is an Assistant Professor of Genetics, Genomics, Evolution, and Development at UC Berkeley. Her lab is interested in how we can use evolution as a guide to transform how we approach development and disease. Using the zebrafish, which can regenerate their heart after substantial injury, the Martik lab has shown that neural crest-derived cells in the adult heart promote repair by re-activating developmental gene networks after injury. Importantly, genetic ablation of neural crest-derived cells leads to failure of regeneration and a large scar. Many questions remain unanswered on how these networks are re-deployed after injury and whether these networks remain silenced in human hearts after injury. The lab’s current hypothesis is that human neural crest-derived cardiomyocytes are unable to redeploy developmental gene networks after injury. Until recently, assessing gene regulatory dynamics in human-derived cardiac tissues was not possible. Now, self-assembling cardiac organoids derived from human pluripotent stem cells have presented a new avenue for exploring cardiac repair in human-derived tissues. Ultimately, the long-term goal is to combine gene regulatory network information from zebrafish and a human-derived platform to identify optimal targets for potential intervention using relevant therapeutic modalities for driving cardiac repair in vivo post-injury.
Host: Jennifer Tserov ([email protected]) & Celina Juliano ([email protected])