Ventricular chambers are essential for the rhythmic contraction and relaxation that occurs in every hearbeat throughout life. Congenital abnormalities in ventricular chamber formation cause severe human heart defects. How the early trabecular meshwork of myocardial fibres forms and subsequently develops into mature chambers is still poorly understood. Here we show that Notch signalling first connects chamber endocardium and myocardium to sustain trabeculation and later coordinates ventricular patterning and compaction with coronary vessel development to give rise to the mature chamber via a temporal sequence of ligand signalling determined by the glycosyltransferase Manic Fringe (Mfng). The early endocardial expression of Mfng favours Dll4-Notch1 signalling, Which induces trabeculation in the developing ventricle.Ventricular maturation and compaction in turn require Mfng and Dll4 downregulation in the endocardium, Which allows myocardial Jag1- And Jag2- Signalling to Notch1 in this tissue.Timely and spatial perturbation of this signalling equilibrium severely disrupts heart chamber formation. Our results open a new research avenue into the pathogenesis of cardiomyopathies. SOURCE: Jose Luis de la Pompa (jlpompa@cnic.es) - Intercellular Signaling in Cardiovascular Development & Disease Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC)

Pluto Bioinformatics

GSE67889: Sequential Notch activation regulates ventricular chamber development