Biomimicry in mending the broken heart; Will hypoxia and pulsatile flow play Cupids?

Oxygen, the most important cellular nutrition, is delivered through a pulsatile blood flow in vertebrates to the tissues and cells in vivo, wherein the oxygen concentration, its availability gradient between systolic and diastolic phase of cardiac activity differ between organs. In the in vitro conditions, manipulation of oxygen availability to the cells under culture have yielded varying behaviours depending on the type of cells, their stemness etc.. Adding a pulsatile component to such in vitro conditions has shown the cells behaving in different manners in such environments. While our earlier editorial titled “Hypoxia is no hype: Perspectives across Phylogeny, Stem Cell differentiation & Geochemistry” had described the importance of hypoxia in stem cell-based research wherein stemness is preserved more efficiently under hypoxia, an article in this issue titled “Comparing the in vivo and in vitro effects of hypoxia (3% O2) on directly derived cells from murine cardiac explants versus murine cardiosphere derived cells” has further intrigued us to analyse this phenomenon.