DNA Blueprint Maps How A Heart Becomes A Heart

Featured Article Academic Journal Main Category: Genetics Also Included In: Heart Disease;Stem Cell Research Article Date: 17 Sep 2012 - 4:00 PDT

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The researchers write about their work in the 13 September online issue of Cell.

The findings bring hope of new treatments for people born with life-threatening heart defects like irregular heart beat (arrhythmia) and hole in the heart (ventricular septal defect).

Senior investigator Benoit Bruneau, associate director of cardiovascular research at Gladstone, an independent, nonprofit biomedical research group, tells the press in a statement:

"Congenital heart defects are the most common type of birth defects -- affecting more than 35,000 newborn babies in the United States each year."

"But how these defects develop at the genetic level has been difficult to pinpoint because research has focused on a small set of genes. Here, we approach heart formation with a wide-angle lens by looking at the entirety of the genetic material that gives heart cells their unique identity," he explains.

For this part of the experiment they extracted DNA from developing and mature heart cells, because they contain the epigenetic signatures written in the DNA. They did this using CHIP-seq, an advanced gene-sequencing tool.

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DNA Blueprint Maps How A Heart Becomes A Heart