Embryological basis for cardiac left-right asymmetry

Abstract

Asymmetric heart tube looping and chamber morphogenesis is a complex process that is just beginning to be understood at the genetic level. Rightward looping is the first embryological manifestation of consistently oriented, left-right asymmetric development of nearly all visceral organs. Intuitively, invariant anatomical asymmetry must derive from a novel mechanism capable of integrating dorsoventral and anteroposterior information. The details of this process are emerging for several vertebrates and reveal that overall left-right asymmetry, once polarized with respect to dorsoventral and anteroposterior axes, unfolds through distinct left- and right-sided programs of gene expression. These, in turn, regulate expression of cardiac and chamber-specific genes which guide heart morphogenesis and differentiation.