Pythons are famous for swallowing enormous meals whole—including morsels bigger than their own body mass. In order to digest these infrequent feasts, the snake’s heart works overtime by increasing its oxygen use, pumping more blood and swelling in size. This rapid response requires a heart that is soft and flexible, the opposite of the stiff and fibrous heart that is characteristic of many human cardiac diseases.
By scrutinizing the cardiac muscle of recently fed pythons, researchers have revealed how the reptiles reshape their hearts in greater detail than ever before—with the hope that understanding the secrets of snakes can help us develop new cardiovascular medicines. The results appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Aug. 19.
“It’s interesting that they address the function of the cardiomyocytes, the cells of the heart,” Tobias Wang, Ph.D., a physiologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who was not involved…
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