Washington: Published on Thursday in Stem Cell Reports, researchers from the University of Minnesota Medical School discovered two signalling pathways that are downregulated in human hearts after birth. These pathways, mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) and phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K)-AKT, lead to maturation of heart cells, allowing them to adapt functionally to their postnatal role. The researchers showed that manipulating these pathways enabled better outcomes in experiments to generate cardiac myocytes, the beating cells of the heart, in vitro from pluripotent stem cells.
