Posted: 6/5/2019
A simple answer would be that for a very long time the human heart was downplayed as a pure muscle that could easily be substituted with an artificial heart!
Just read this interesting article: Unknown mini-proteins in the heart (published 5/30/19 by the Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine). Here is the link to the corresponding research paper.
Here is a quote from the introduction of this article (emphasis added):
“The human heart holds many secrets. And not just in a figurative, emotional sense; also from a rational, scientific point of view, we know surprisingly little about the function of the muscular organ that supplies every cell of our bodies with oxygen – and why it sometimes doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.”
More quotes:
““With the help of a relatively new technique known as ribosome profiling, or Ribo-Seq, we have now been able to determine for the first time not only in isolated cells, but also in intact human heart tissue, which mRNA sites the ribosomes migrate to,” … . “Using special algorithms, we were then able to calculate which proteins are produced in the heart during translation.”
Using this technique, the researchers discovered a whole series of tiny, previously unknown proteins. Another surprising discovery ... was that many of the microproteins were encoded by RNAs that were not believed to have encoding properties”
“Using special microscopic techniques, … to observe that, once produced, more than half of these micro proteins migrate to the mitochondria .... “This means that they are obviously used in the heart’s energy production processes,” ... “Since many heart diseases are caused by a faulty energy metabolism, we were particularly interested in this result.” ”
“The translation of micro proteins is not restricted to the heart and prominent in the translatomes of human kidney and liver.”
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