During heart morphogenesis, cardiac chambers arise by differential expansion of regions of the primitive cardiac tube. This process is under the control of specific transcription factors such as Tbx5 and dHAND. To gain insight into the cellular mechanisms that underlie cardiogenesis, we have used a retrospective clonal approach based on the spontaneous recombination of an nlaacZ reporter gene t...

After initial formation, the heart tube grows by addition of second heart field progenitor cells to its poles. The transcription factor Isl1 is expressed in the entire second heart field in mouse, and Isl1-deficient mouse embryos show defects in arterial and venous pole development. The expression of Isl1 is conserved in zebrafish cardiac progenitors; however, Isl1 is required for cardiomyocyte...

Dein (2002) comments on our editorial on explanatory models (Bhui & Bhugra, 2002), but fails to apprehend the conceptual flaws in his assertions, promotes a complacent attitude to the challenges of cultural psychiatry, and is threatened by a patient’s explanatory model that differs from his own. Dein agrees with us that explanatory models are not stable, and are dynamic, complex, shifting entit...

Heart development requires a precise temporal regulation of gene expression in cardiomyoblasts. Therefore, the transcriptional changes differentiating cells can lead to congenital heart diseases. Although genetic mutations underlie most these alterations, exposure environmental contaminants, such as bisphenol A (BPA), has been recently considered risk factor well. In this study we investigated ...