Luxan et al. (2013) reported that inactivation of the notch pathway causes left ventricular non-compaction cardiomyopathy. Urbanek et al. (2010) found that inhibition of notch1-dependent cardiomyogenesis results in cardiomyopathy of the neonatal heart (Urbanek et al., 2010). In addition, Yu and Song (2014) identified that notch1 inhibits cardiomyocyte apoptosis after myocardial ischemia. Besides, notch3 has been suggested to be a protective factor for prevention of post-MI myocardial fibrosis (Zhang et al., 2016), but the underlying molecular mechanism remained unclear. Here, NOTCH1 is linked to myocardial ischemia.