![]() To understand what’s going wrong in various forms of heart disease, “first we need to know what is normal,” says Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Christine Seidman, a cardiovascular geneticist at Harvard University and director of the Cardiovascular Genetics Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The researchers examined six regions in 14 healthy donor hearts, creating a detailed database that provides a new basis of comparison for studying heart disease, the leading cause of death worldwide. Now a team of scientists has created the first atlas of human heart cells, a collection of maps showing nearly half a million heart cells and identifying the role of each in the heart’s symphony. Like an orchestra, thousands of cells have to master their individual performances as well as work together. Though we barely notice it most of the time, the steady beating of a human heart is an amazingly complex performance. A new cell atlas reveals this protein and others in different heart cells’ locations. In these beating human heart cells, scientists have highlighted a protein important in muscle contraction (green). ![]()
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