Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 105, Issue 18, Pages 6638-6643Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0802319105
Keywords
cardiac development; signal transduction
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Funding
- NHLBI NIH HHS [HL73394, HL064382, R01 HL066100, R01 HL073394, R01 HL064382] Funding Source: Medline
- NIGMS NIH HHS [R01 GM047458] Funding Source: Medline
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Focal adhesion kinase (FAK) is a nonreceptor tyrosine kinase that plays an important role in integrin-mediated signal transduction. To explore the role and mechanisms of FAK in cardiac development, we inactivated FAK in embryonic cardiomyocytes by crossing the floxed FAK mice with myosin light chain-2a (MLC2a) Cre mice, which expressed Cre as early as embryonic day 9.5 in the heart. The majority of conditional FAK knockout mice generated from MLC2a-Cre (CFKO-2a) died in the embryonic stage with thin ventricular wall and ventricular septal defects. A small fraction of CFKO-2a mice survived to adulthood with spontaneous eccentric right ventricle hypertrophy. Transmission electron microscopy analysis displayed swelling in the rough endoplasmic reticulum in CFKO-2a embryonic cardiomyocytes. We found that decreased cell proliferation, but not increased cell apoptosis or differentiation, is the reason for the thin ventricular wall in CFKO-2a mice. Microarray analysis suggests that myocyte enhancer factor 2a (MEF2a) can be regulated by FAK and that inactivation of FAK in the embryonic heart compromised MEF2a expression. Last, we found that Src, but not PI3K, is important in mediating signal transduction for the regulation of MEF2a by FAK. Together, these results identified the role and mechanisms of FAK in embryonic cardiac development.
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