Murine Cardiovascular Development

Abstract

The fascination of developmental processes is how the complex structures that characterize advanced organisms can arise from a single cell. As with any system, the key to its understanding is to first define its component parts and then devise experimental strategies to test their function. Experiments in the early days of the discipline manipulated cells and tissues in frog eggs and chick embryos to demonstrate the role of cell inductive or determined behaviors in the formation of embryonic structures. The advent of the molecular era of science witnessed a renaissance in experimentation in developmental processes. Various cloning and gene expression-profiling techniques have allowed for the identification of many gene products that are expressed in the heart early in development. The completion of the sequencing of a number of genomes means that most or all of the genes will have been identified. The challenge now is to understand how a gene-based regulatory program controls the proliferation, differentiation, death and migration of cells in a regional and temporal-specific manner so as to form the mature four-chambered heart.