Imma Perfetto
Cosmos science journalist
New python research could inspire treatments for cardiac fibrosis, a common human heart condition in which heart tissue stiffens.
“We found that the python heart is basically able to radically remodel itself, becoming much less stiff and much more energy efficient, in just 24 hours,” says lead researcher Leslie Leinwand, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and chief scientific officer of the BioFrontiers Institute, USA.
“If we can map out how the python does this and harness it to use therapeutically in people it would be extraordinary.”
Constricting pythons can go months to a year before eating a meal that could be greater than their own body mass and take weeks to digest.
Previous research has found that, over the course of about 7 to 10 days after eating, pythons’ hearts grow, pulse rates double, and bloodstreams turn milky white with circulating fats which nourish the heart tissue.
Then, all returns to normal with a heart slightly larger, and stronger, heart than before.
The new study in the journal PNAS explores how ball python (Python regius) hearts achieve this response.
Leinwand and colleagues fasted pythons for 28 days and compared the those that had been fed a meal (25% of their body weight) to those that hadn’t.
They found that myofibrils, specialised bundles of cardiac muscles that help the heart expand and contract, became less stiff and contracted with about 50% more force in fed snakes.
Fed snakes also had profoundly different epigenetics compared to unfed ones. Epigenetics, which means “on top” of the genes, describes the way in which cells modify genes to turn them on or off without causing changes to the DNA sequence.
In total, 840 genes were expressed differently in the hearts of fasted and fed snakes. More research is needed to identify what these genes do, but the study suggests that some may nudge the python heart to burn fat instead of sugar for fuel – something which diseased hearts struggle to do.
