Abstract
The plasticity of adult bone marrow cells remains a controversial topic. The initial enthusiastic claims that these cells could “regenerate” the infarcted myocardium by converting into new cardiomyocytes1 have subsequently been dampened by reports that such an outcome was unlikely.2,3,4 Indeed, the purported transdifferentiation of bone marrow cells has most often been based on immunohistochemical data, which are known to be potentially misleading because of the autofluorescence of infarcted tissue. More reliable cell-tracking methods, based on genetic tags, have led to the opposite conclusion—that bone marrow cells are in fact lineage-restricted.2,3,4 Scherschel et al.,5 using two-photon laser scanning microscopy (TPLSM), provide compelling evidence in this issue of Molecular Therapy that bone marrow cells actually lack a fundamentally important attribute of cardiomyocytes: the ability to develop cytosolic calcium transients in response to membrane depolarization.
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