As a Bothell Fellow, Joanna Argana and a team of researchers from the Davis Lab examined the importance of external cues from the myocardium and extracellular environment in regulating how the fibroblast responds to repeat injury stimuli. By developing a protocol to isolate discrete populations of fibroblasts and study them in hearts void of injury, the researchers demonstrated that cardiac fibroblasts from the same strain can be isolated and transplanted to other hearts, without exogenous extracellular matrix.