Thirty Years’ Progress in the Study of Drosophila Heart Development
1. The Laboratory of Heart Development Research, College of Life Sciences, Hunan Normal University, Changsha 410081, Hunan, China; 2. Hunan Provincial People’s Hospital (the First Affiliated Hospital of Hunan Normal University), Changsha 410006, Hunan, China
Abstract：Over the past three decades, Drosophila melanogaster has emerged as a leading model organism to investigate the regulatory mechanism of heart development. The development process of Drosophila heart goes through three major stages: embryonic stage, larval stage, and adult stage. In the early embryonic stage, genes such as Tinman, Dorsocross and Pannier are key regulators. Tinman participates in the earliest differen-tiation of cardiac precursor cells and the formation of cardiac cells, while Dorsocross and Pannier affect the directional differentiation of cardiac precursor cells and the formation of cardiac lumens. During the late em-bryonic and larval stages, the Drosophila heart tube undergoes further development and remodeling, which is mainly regulated by multiple transcription factors such as Hand, Mef2, and the Hox gene family. The Hox gene family and Tinman continue to wield significant influence in the adult stage. Despite morphological disparities between the fruit fly heart and vertebrate hearts, the early developmental process, regulatory genes and signaling pathways remain conserved in both. This review encapsulates three decades of research advances in gene regulation of heart development in D. melanogaster, and also describes the prospects of using Drosophila model to study heart-related diseases in humans.
