Heart Development and Regeneration Lab
The Heart Development and Regeneration Lab aims to understand the fundamental mechanisms of cardiac cell proliferation and differentiation and how signaling communications instruct these processes:
- How do the cells in the developing heart communicate with each other to build a functional heart?
- How are cardiac cell lineages determined during early heart development?
- How can we promote adult regeneration by remodeling chromatin accessibility?
The lab takes advantage of multiple cutting-edge technologies, including single cell RNA sequencing, ribosome profiling, ChIP-sequencing, CROP-Seq, ATAC-Seq, special transcriptomics, proteomics, CRISPR-Cas9 and confocal imaging, and generates and uses genetic mouse models and human induced pluripotent cells to tackle these and other important questions in the field.
Projects and Publications
Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most common birth defect, affecting nearly 1% of live births. By expanding knowledge of the pathogenesis of CHD, the lab team aims to improve CHD treatment and prevention and adult heart repair and regeneration.
A key process in heart development is ventricular trabeculation and compaction. The failure of this process can result in left ventricular noncompaction cardiomyopathy (LVNC), the third most common form of cardiomyopathy. The etiology of LVNC is still poorly understood, warranting further investigation.
During early heart development, the derivation and commitment of each cardiac lineage is crucial for later cardiac morphogenesis. However, in-depth understandings of lineage specification are still lacking.
Our lab is interested in learning how cardiac lineages are defined at epigenetic level. For instance, how chromatin accessibility may sculpture diversified cardiac lineages including subtypes of cardiomyocyte lineages.
Adult cardiomyocytes are terminally differentiated and have exited the cell cycle, resulting in negligible regenerative capacity in response to myocardial loss after cardiac insults such as heart failure. Cardiomyocyte developmental/proliferative transition is coupled with dramatic epigenetic changes. Our lab is currently trying to harness chromatin status to awaken adult cardiomyocyte regenerative capacity.
Lab Staff
Deqiang (“DQ”) Li, MD, PhD
Principal Investigator
Deqiang.Li@NationwideChildrens.org
Jihyun Jang, PhD
Principal Investigator
Jihyun.Jang@NationwideChildrens.org
Maren Beall
Research Assistant
Maren.Beall@NationwideChildrens.org
Lianbo Shao
Postdoctoral Researcher
Hector Gonzalez Rivera
Student Researcher
Vivien Holop
Student Researcher
Xiaoye Yang
Student Researcher
- Guang Song, MD, PhD
- Xiaosu Song, MD, PhD
- Hongxuan Feng, PhD
- Qianshan Li, MD, PhD
- Xuebin Fu, PhD
- Sarah Pettit
- Ye Jun Kim
- Erick Kim
- G. Schuyler Brown
Join Our Lab
We are committed to training the next generation of scientists as the true future of science and medicine. We are looking for highly motivated postdoctoral researchers and students to join our team. View open positions or contact our team using the form below.