Heart disease is one of the largest causes of death in humans throughout the developed world. Despite its critical role in maintaining physiologic homeostasis, the adult mammalian heart does not exhibit a significant capacity for regeneration. | Turkish Journal of Biology Review Article Turk J Biol (2016) 40: 265-275 © TÜBİTAK doi: Cellular and molecular basis of cardiac regeneration Justin JUDD, Wanling XUAN, Guo N. HUANG* Cardiovascular Research Institute, School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA Received: Accepted/Published Online: Final Version: Abstract: Heart disease is one of the largest causes of death in humans throughout the developed world. Despite its critical role in maintaining physiologic homeostasis, the adult mammalian heart does not exhibit a significant capacity for regeneration. By contrast, several lower vertebrates exhibit a remarkable ability to regenerate the aging myocardium in response to severe injury. Additionally, recent evidence has shed light on a transient regenerative window in postnatal mammals. In this review, we discuss key findings that help to unravel the differences in cardiac regeneration across phylogeny and ontogeny. Furthermore, we highlight recent significant progress in the pursuit of adult mammalian cardiac regeneration. Collectively, this important body of work has great potential impact on human therapy for heart failure. Key words: Heart, cardiac, mammal, vertebrate, regeneration 1. Introduction Historically, adult cardiac muscle was believed to be terminally differentiated, with little potential for renewal. In contrast, an early report in 1956 described myocardial cell division and some degree of regeneration in young rats (between 4 and 7 days of age) in response to burn injury (Robledo, 1956). Subsequently, several lower vertebrates, such as the frog (Rumyantsev, 1973), newt (Oberpriller and Oberpriller, 1974), zebrafish (Poss et al., 2002), and axolotl (Vargas-González et al., 2005; Cano-Martínez et al., 2010) were found to exhibit some capacity to regenerate severely injured cardiac tissue. More recently, it was .
