The human heart is unveiled at very high resolution in the first atlas of cardiac cells: over 500,000 are mapped and analyzed one by one, down to the smallest molecular details, to reveal how a healthy heart works and what can go wrong in case of disease.
The result, which may pave the way for the development of personalized therapies for the precision medicine of the future, is published in the journal Nature by an international group that includes researchers from Harvard, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Wellcome Sanger Institute, Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine and Imperial College London.
The result is part of the great Human Cell Atlas project, which intends to map all types of cells present in the human body: its scope is comparable to that of the Human Genome Project, which in 2000 obtained the first DNA map of the man.
The atlas of heart cells was made using 14 healthy organs from donors not eligible for transplantation: the researchers collected and studied about 500,000 cells, combining single-cell biochemical analyzes, imaging techniques and machine learning.
They were thus able to see which genes are turned on and off in each cell, finding the differences that distinguish the different parts of the heart.
In each region there are in fact particular subtypes of cells which probably have different origins and which could react differently to therapies.
"We also mapped heart cells that could potentially be affected by the SarsCoV2 virus and found that specialized cells in small blood vessels can be targeted by the virus," explains Italian researcher Michela Noseda, who works at Imperial College London.
"Our data is a mine of information for understanding the subtleties of heart disease."