ankrd1a consistently marks cardiomyocytes bordering the injury or scar area and affects their dedifferentiation during zebrafish heart regeneration after cryoinjury

In contrast to humans, zebrafish have a remarkable ability to regenerate injured heart through a highly orchestrated process involving all cardiac structures. To replace the lost myocardium, resident cardiomyocytes (CMs) dedifferentiate and proliferate, invading the injured area. The response of the myocardium is preceded by the activation of the epicardium and endocardium, which form active scaffolds to provide mechanical and paracrine support to guide regeneration. New CMs use protrusions to migrate and invade fibrotic injured tissue, to replace it with functional myocardium. Here, we investigated the expression profile of the stress-responsive ankrd1a gene in different cardiac structures, at key time points during regeneration, aiming to gain insight into its precise roles during zebrafish heart regeneration. In the TgBAC(ankrd1a:EGFP) reporter line, transgene upregulation was restricted to the myocardium, initiated as early as 15 hours post-cryoinjury, and consistently marked CMs bordering the injury or scar area during regeneration. Transcriptome profiling and immunostaining revealed a potential role of ankrd1a in regulating CMs’ dedifferentiation, as well as changes in expression of genes associated with antigen presentation and extracellular matrix composition in the ankrd1a mutant. Our results indicate that the ankrd1a is dispensable for ventricle regeneration after cryoinjury and may be considered as a marker and fine-tuner in the healing process of injured cardiac muscle.