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Ontogenesis of Myocardial Function

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Ontogeny and Phylogeny of the Vertebrate Heart

Abstract

Function of developing heart is underlined by its morphology. Here we focus on development of cardiac pumping function, conduction, and metabolism in higher vertebrates. For simplicity, we distinguish three prenatal stages with different morphology, contraction mechanics, and conduction parameters: tubular heart, trabeculated one, and fully septated heart with coronary perfusion. Postnatal maturation involves namely quantitative changes and appearance of gender differences in parameters like tolerance to ischemia. The straight or looped tubular hearts operate as suction pumps and possess a caudally localized pacemaker and slow, conduction and contraction with a complete occlusion of lumen during systole. With the appearance of atrial and ventricular chambers, the preseptation trabeculated heart shares many similarities with the adult heart, but the same function is achieved by different means. The early embryonic heart is significantly more tolerant to oxygen deprivation than the fetal one. Even after septation, considerable maturation of cardiac morphology and function occurs during fetal and early postnatal period. The principal changes include spiraling of ventricular myoarchitecture, increase in capillary number, more regular arrangement of myofibrils and mitochondria and metabolic switch related to dramatically increased oxygen tension after birth. The newborn heart shows a higher resistance to hypoxia than the adult one, and it cannot be increased by ischemic preconditioning or adaptation to chronic hypoxia.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank to all our past and present collaborators who were instrumental in generating results discussed in this paper and helped to shape our thinking about the developing heart.

Funding: Supported by Ministry of Education VZ 0021620806 and 1 M0510, Academy of Sciences Purkinje Fellowship to D.S., and institutional AV0Z50110509. Further support comes from Grant Agency of the Czech Republic 304/08/0615 and P302/11/1308.

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  1. Institute of Anatomy, First Faculty of Medicine, Charles University in Prague, 12800, Prague, Czech Republic

    David Sedmera

  2. Institute of Physiology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 14220, Prague, Czech Republic

    David Sedmera

  3. Institute of Physiology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Videnska 1083, 14220, Prague, Czech Republic

    Bohuslav Ostadal

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Correspondence to David Sedmera .

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  1. , Institute of Anatomy, Charles University, U nemocnice 3, Prague, 128 00, Czech Republic

    David Sedmera

  2. Fac. Science, Inst. Biological Sciences Zoofysiology, University of Aarhus, C. F. Moellers Allé, Aarhus C, 8000, Denmark

    Tobias Wang

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Sedmera, D., Ostadal, B. (2012). Ontogenesis of Myocardial Function. In: Sedmera, D., Wang, T. (eds) Ontogeny and Phylogeny of the Vertebrate Heart. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3387-3_7

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