The adult heart is able to activate cardioprotective programmes and modifies its architecture in response to physiological or pathological changes. While mammalian cardiac remodelling often involves hypertrophic expansion, the adult zebrafish heart exploits hyperplastic growth. This capacity depends on the responsiveness of zebrafish cardiomyocytes to mitogenic signals throughout their entire l...

UNLABELLED A new conceptual modality for nano-cryosurgical ablation of tumors is proposed in this article. The main strategy is to apply MgO nanoparticles (NPs), which are nontoxic, biodegradable, and have few side-effects on the human body, to mediate the freezing procedure effectively. Detailed investigation via animal experiments and nucleation analysis demonstrated that delivery of MgO NPs ...

The adult zebrafish has been used to model the electrocardiogram (ECG) for human cardiovascular studies. Nonetheless huge variations are observed among studies probably because of the lack of a reliable and reproducible recording method. In our study, an adult zebrafish surface ECG recording technique was improved using a multi-electrode method and by pre-opening the pericardial sac. A convenie...

Introduction Local ischemia in the heart during myocardial infarction will result in massive cell death of rhythmically contracting cardiomyocytes. Unfortunately, regeneration of cardiomyocytes is rare and during left ventricular (LV) remodeling affected tissue is replaced by non-contractile fibrotic tissue. Stem cell-based therapies can either provide the heart with new functional cardiomyocyt...

Cryosurgery is the destruction of undesired biological tissues by freezing. For internal organs, multiple cryoprobes are inserted into the tissue with the goal of maximizing cryoinjury within a predefined target region, while minimizing cryoinjury to the surrounding tissues. The objective of this study is to develop a computerized planning tool to determine the best locations to insert the cryo...

Levels of maturation-promoting factor (MPF) in oocytes decline after vitrification, and this decline has been suggested as one of the main causes of low developmental competence resulting from cryoinjury. Here, we evaluated MPF activity in vitrified mouse eggs following treatment with caffeine, a known stimulator of MPF activity, and/or the proteasome inhibitor MG132. Collected MII oocytes were...

AIMS While zebrafish embryos are amenable to in vivo imaging, allowing the study of morphogenetic processes during development, intravital imaging of adults is hampered by their small size and loss of transparency. The use of adult zebrafish as a vertebrate model of cardiac disease and regeneration is increasing at high speed. It is therefore of great importance to establish appropriate and rob...

Heart failure is often the consequence of insufficient cardiac regeneration. Neonatal mice retain a certain capability of myocardial regeneration until postnatal day (P)7, although the underlying transcriptional mechanisms remain largely unknown. We demonstrate here that cardiac abundance of the transcription factor GATA4 was high at P1, but became strongly reduced at P7 in parallel with loss o...