Developmental Biology and Regeneration
Research interest
In contrast to adult mammals, zebrafish have the capacity to regenerate their hearts upon several types of injury. In the laboratory, we use cryoinjury, to induce a cardiac tissue damage with the aim to mimic the consequences of tissue loss upon myocardial infarction González-Rosa and Mercader, 2012). Upon eliminating up to ¼ of the cardiac ventricle zebrafish are able to regenerate the damaged myocardium and recover cardiac function (González-Rosa et al., 2014). Massive collagen depositions precede the process of cardiac regeneration, revealing that, in contrast to mammals, cardiac fibrosis is reversible in the zebrafish and occurs as an intermediate step during regeneration (González-Rosa et al., 2011). We are interested in understanding the mechanisms through with in the zebrafish, the fibrotic tissue, including extracellular matrix and myofibroblast regress, as this might have implications for the design of antifibrotic strategies in mammals. We are also interested in understanding which are the cells contributing to the fibrotic response.
Group Developmental Biology and Regeneration
News
- September 2019
Second internship of Vinzenzo Di Donato.
We welcome our Masterstudent Andrej Vianin.
Review on Zebrafish as a model for organ regeneration is out.
Happy to contribute to preprint on the role of cilia proteins controlling Yap1 during heart development. - August 2019
PhD defense of Marcos Sande-Melón. Our first Swiss Doctor! - July 2019
“Actin dynamics and the Bmp pathway drive apical extrusion of proepicardial cells” Congratulations to Laura and Alex and the rest of authors!.
Celebration of the joint 4DHeart and CEM Summer School
Our research article on the role of Wt1 and macrophages during heart regeneration is out at Cell Reports. - June 2019
check out our new preprint “Pre-existent adult sox10+ cardiomyocytes contribute to myocardial regeneration in the zebrafish”.
We enjoyed our lab retreat 2019 in Zermatt. - May 2019
Inês Marques has been accepted to the COMET Career Programme at the University of Bern and Indré Piragyté-Langa received an UniBE Initiator grant. Congrats to our postdocs! - April 2019
Congrats to Andrés Sanz-Morejón for winning a Best oral presentation award at the Swiss Zebrafish conference 2019! - March 2019
We welcome Benedetta Coppe, who start her PhD in our group. - February 2019
Happy to have contributed to “Retinal microglia signaling affects Müller cell behavior in the zebrafish following laser injury induction” published in Glia. Thanks to Federica Conedera and Volker Enzmann for the collaboration. - December 2018
Nadia Mercader received an ERC Consolidator Grant for the Project TransReg- 819717. - October 2018
Vincenzo Di Donato from Zeclinics spent a short internship in the lab and Marius Botos joined the group as a bioinformatician. - September 2018
We welcome Indré Piragyte-Langa, anew postdoctoral fellow in the group.
We got featured in the September issue of Unipress. - June 2018
We are proud to announce the publication of a Special Issue on Regeneration at the International Journal of Developmental Biology edited by Florenci Serras and Nadia Mercader. - May 2018
A preprint on our work on proepicardium formation is online.
We enjoyed our group retreat at Lac Léman.
Congratulation to Andrés, for winning the best poster prize at the 9th Ascona International Workshop on Cardiomyocyte Biology AND the 11th Swiss Zebrafish conference!! - April 2018
We are happy to announce that the Human Frontier Science Program has granted the project Handling OXPHOS structural heterogeneity and metabolic plasticity (starting date Summer 2018). The project is coordinated by José Antonio Enriquez (CNIC, Spain) and counts with the participation of Karin Busch (University Münster, Germany), James Eberwine (University of Pennsylvania, USA) and ourselves.
During this month, Daniel Windecker performed his Matura project on zebrafish heart regeneration in our group.
Our paper on Transient Fibrosis regression during heart regeneration in the zebrafish is now online at PNAS. - February 2018
on bioRxiv Sánchez-Iranzo et al., Transient fibrosis resolves via fibroblast inactivation in the regenerating zebrafish heart. - January 2018
New Publication: Sánchez-Iranzo et al., Tbx5a lineage tracing shows cardiomyocyte plasticity during zebrafish heart regeneration. - September 2017
Participating at Nacht der Forschung. - June 2017
Enjoying our group retreat !
New article: Awasthi Mishra N, Drögemüller C, Jagannathan V, Keller I, Wüthrich D, Bruggmann R, Beck J, Schütz E, Brenig B, Demmel S, Moser S, Signer-Hasler H, Pieńkowska-Schelling A, Schelling C, Sande M, Rongen R, Rieder S, Kelsh RN, Mercader N, Leeb T. A structural variant in the 5'-flanking region of the TWIST2 gene affects melanocyte development in belted cattle. PLoS One. 2017 Jun 28;12(6):e0180170 - March 2017
New publication. Vazão H, Rosa S, Barata T, Costa R, Pitrez PR, Honório I, de Vries MR, Papatsenko D, Benedito R, Saris D, Khademhosseini A, Quax PH, Pereira CF, Mercader N, Fernandes H, Ferreira L. High-throughput identification of small molecules that affect human embryonic vascular development. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Mar 27. - February 2017
We are happy to announce two new PhD training programs:
4D analysis of heart development and regeneration using advanced light microscopy
PhD specialization: Cutting Edge Microscopy. - January 2017
Hosting of the 10th Swiss Zebrafish Conference. - December 2016
Ronja Baal joins the Group. - November 2016
Kick off meeting liveHeart. - October 2016
Cogliati S, Calvo E, Loureiro M, Guaras AM, Nieto-Arellano R, Garcia-Poyatos C, Ezkurdia I, Mercader N, Vázquez J, Enriquez JA. Mechanism of super-assembly of respiratory complexes III and IV. Nature. 2016 Oct 24;539(7630):579-582. - September 2016
Attending the EMBO conference on The molecular and cellular basis of regeneration and tissue repair in Salerno. - August 2016
Eduardo Díaz from CNIC is visiting us. - July 2016
Fabian Häberli joins the group. - June 2016
Alexander Ernst starts his PhD within the project liveHeart. - May 2016
Neue Publikation:
Analysis of the dynamic co-expression network of heart regeneration in the zebrafish. - April 2016
Jose Antonio Enriquez and Rui Benedito from CNIC visited us
Shaira Murugan joined the lab. - March 2016
Neue Publikationen:
2C-Cas9: a versatile tool for clonal analysis of gene function.
Interplay between cardiac function and heart development. - February 2016
First Group retreat celebrated in Bern 19-21th February. - January 2016
Carolina García, Marcos Sande and Andrés Sanz join the Institute of Anatomy. - December 2015
Marcos Sande wins the best Poster Prize at YLS Salamanca 2015. - November 2015
Andrés Sanz wins the 1st prize of the Spanish National XIV Certamen Universitario ARQUIMEDES, for his Master thesis.
more about research
The epicardium, the outer layer covering the myocardium contains precursors contributing to the fibrotic response observed after cryoinjuring the zebrafish heart (González-Rosa et al., 2012). We are interested in analysing the mechanisms of epicardium reestablishment as well as the influence of this layer during the regeneration process.
We are also interested in analysing how the epicardium forms during embryonic development. The epicardium derived from the proepicardium, a cell cluster emerging at the inflow region of the forming heart tube (Peralta et al., 2014). Using live imaging in zebrafish embryos we are studying the mechanisms through which proepicardial cells are emerging from the pericardial wall and attach to the myocardium. We found that proepicardial cells detach from the pericardial wall and are advected around the cardiac ventricle, and subsequently attach to its surface (Peralta et al., 2013). We also found that this process is dependent on the heartbeat. Our current effort is dedicated to understand the underlying mechanosensory pathways as well as the role of extracellular and secreted molecules controlling proepicardium and epicardium formation.
Selected Publications
Marques et al., 2019
Sanz-Morejón A et al., 2019
Marcos Sande-Melón et al., 2019
Andrés-Delgado L, Ernst A, et al., 2019
Laura Andrés-Delgado, Alexander Ernst, María Galardi-Castilla, David Bazaga, Marina Peralta, Juliane Münch, Juan Manuel González-Rosa, Federico Tessadori, Jeroen Bakkers, José Luis de la Pompa, Julien Vermot, Nadia Mercader, 2018
Sánchez-Iranzo et al., 2018
Sánchez-Iranzo et al., 2018
Andrés-Delgado & Mercader, 2016
González-Rosa et al., 2014
Peralta et al., 2013
González-Rosa et al., 2012
González-Rosa et al., 2012
González-Rosa et al., 2011
Further Publications
Peralta et al., 2019
Lowe V, Wisniewski L, Sayers J, Evans I, Frankel P, Mercader-Huber N, Zachary IC, Pellet-Many C,, 2019
Conedera FM, Pousa AMQ, Mercader N, Tschopp M, Enzmann V., 2019
Mercader N. & Serras F., 2018
Mercader N. & Serras F., 2018
Mercader N. & Serras F., 2018
Vazão et al., 2017
Awashti et al., 2017
Cogliati S. et al, , 2016
Rodius S. et al., 2016
Di Donato et al., 2016
Mercader N. et al., 2013
Mercader N. et al., 2013
Grants
Job offers
We are seeking to recruit a Bioinformatician with expertise in transcriptomics. Please contact nadia.mercader@ana.unibe.ch for further details.
We are currently looking for enthusiastic undegraduate students interested in performing their Master in science project on cardiac development or heart regeneration in the zebrafish.
Please write an email including a motivation letter and CV to nadia.mercader@ana.unibe.ch.