Long-term, in toto live imaging of cardiomyocyte behaviour during mouse ventricle chamber formation at single-cell resolution (Yue Y, Zong W, Li X, Li J, Zhang Y, Wu R, Liu Y, Cui J, Wang Q, Bian Y, Yu X, Liu Y, Tan G, Zhang Y, Zhao G, Zhou B, Chen L, Xiao W, Cheng H, He A. Nat Cell Biol. 2020, 22(3):332-340)
Live imaging of mammalian developing organs is a challenge. This becomes a really complex task when combined with the tracking of all cell behaviours in the forming organ. Yue and colleagues, in a very elegant study, use a live-imaging system comprising a customized vertical light-sheet microscope coupled to a mouse embryo culture module to obtain high quality images of the developing heart. The authors follow a heartbeat-gated imaging strategy to realize volumetric imaging of developing mouse hearts at single-cell resolution. This allowed these researchers to follow cell lineages for up to 1.5 days. The building of 4D landscapes of Nppa-positive cardiomyocyte cells shows what the authors call a “blueprint for ventricle chamber formation” that is characterized by the outward migration of the outermost cardiomyocytes together with cell intercalation and horizontal division. Among the results presented, the study identifies two types of cardiomyocytes in the developing cardiac trabeculae and suggest an early cell fate specification for, at least, a part of trabecular cardiomyocytes. Taken together, these data suggest that the technology and approach taken in this work is suitable for the study of complex cellular events taking place during heart organogenesis.
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