Not just inductive: a crucial mechanical role for the endoderm during heart tube assembly.

ABSTRACT: The heart is the first functioning organ to form during development. During gastrulation, the cardiac progenitors reside in the lateral plate mesoderm but maintain close contact with the underlying endoderm. In amniotes, these bilateral heart fields are initially organized as a pair of flat epithelia that move towards the embryonic midline and fuse above the anterior intestinal portal (AIP) to form the heart tube. This medial motion is typically attributed to active mesodermal migration over the underlying endoderm. In this model, the role of the endoderm is twofold: to serve as a mechanically passive substrate for the crawling mesoderm and to secrete various growth factors necessary for cardiac specification and differentiation. Here, using computational modeling and experiments on chick

SUBMITTER: Varner VD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3317971 | biostudies-literature | 2012 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature