Cardiovascular defects in a mouse model of HOXA1 syndrome

Congenital heart disease is one of the most common human birth defects, yet many genes and pathways regulating heart development remain unknown. A recent study in humans revealed that mutations in a single Hox gene, HOXA1 (Athabascan Brainstem Dysgenesis Syndrome, Bosley-Salih-Alorainy Syndrome), can cause severe cardiovascular malformations, some of which are lethal without surgical intervention. Since the discovery of the human syndromes, there have been no reports of any Hox mouse mutants with cardiac defects, hampering studies to explore the developmental causes of the human disease. In this study, we identify severe cardiovascular malformations in a Hox mouse model, which mimic the congenital heart defects in HOXA1 syndrome patients. Hoxa1 null mice show defects such as interrupted aortic arch, aberrant subclavian artery and Tetralogy of Fallot, demonstrating that Hoxa1 is required for patterning of the great arteries and outflow tract of the heart. We show that during early embryogenesis, Hoxa1 is expressed in precursors of cardiac neural crest cells (NCCs), which populate the heart. We further demonstrate that Hoxa1 acts upstream of several genes, important for neural crest specification. Thus, our data allow us to suggest a model in which Hoxa1 regulates heart development through its influence on cardiac NCCs, providing insight into the mechanisms underlying the human disease.