Heart Function and Form
Our previous work has demonstrated that there is an intimate link between early heart function and morphogenesis. In fact, the heart is the first organ to begin mechanical function, and does so well before morphogenesis is complete. However, the molecular mechanism for this association is unknown. Once we create the appropriate transgenic lines we will be able find the molecular pathway in two ways.
First, we can perform microarray analysis of endocardial and myocardial cells from normally functioning and poorly functioning hearts to identify molecules whose expression is changed under poor function. Second, we can specifically perturb the pathways in which these genes lie (e,g. by morpholino or RNA injection) and assay the effects on cushion/valve formation in the fluorescent lines. We believe that this work will be quite novel and will reveal important insights about the function-form link in early heart morphogenesis.
