Peralta Marina, González-Rosa Juan Manuel, Marques Inês Joao, Mercader Nadia
Department of Cardiovascular Development and Repair, Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares Carlos III CNIC, calle Melchor Fernández Almagro 3, 28029 Madrid, Spain;
Cardiovascular Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA.
J Dev Biol. 2014 Apr 11;2(2):101-116. doi: 10.3390/jdb2020101.
The epicardium is the mesothelial outer layer of the vertebrate heart. It plays an important role during cardiac development by, among other functions, nourishing the underlying myocardium, contributing to cardiac fibroblasts and giving rise to the coronary vasculature. The epicardium also exerts key functions during injury responses in the adult and contributes to cardiac repair. In this article, we review current knowledge on the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying epicardium formation in the zebrafish, a teleost fish, which is rapidly gaining status as an animal model in cardiovascular research, and compare it with the mechanisms described in other vertebrate models. We moreover describe the expression patterns of a subset of available zebrafish Wilms' tumor 1 transgenic reporter lines and discuss their specificity, applicability and limitations in the study of epicardium formation.
心外膜是脊椎动物心脏的间皮外层。它在心脏发育过程中发挥着重要作用，除其他功能外，还滋养其下方的心肌，促进心脏成纤维细胞的形成，并产生冠状动脉血管系统。心外膜在成体损伤反应中也发挥关键作用，并有助于心脏修复。在本文中，我们综述了目前关于斑马鱼（一种硬骨鱼，在心血管研究中迅速成为一种动物模型）心外膜形成的细胞和分子机制的知识，并将其与其他脊椎动物模型中描述的机制进行比较。此外，我们描述了一组可用的斑马鱼威尔姆斯瘤1转基因报告基因系的表达模式，并讨论了它们在研究心外膜形成中的特异性、适用性和局限性。
