doi: 10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.108.179978
© 2008 American Heart Association, Inc.
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Deck of CArGs
From the Aab Cardiovascular Research Institute, University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry, Rochester, NY.
Correspondence to Aab Cardiovascular Research Institute, University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry, 211 Bailey Road, West Henrietta, NY 14586. E-mail j.m.miano@rochester.edu
See related article, pages 61–69
Key Words: serum response factor • myocardin • promoter • knockout • bioinformatics
An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract. |
The instructions for generating and sustaining all life forms are encoded within each life form’s genome. A major challenge in the postgenomic sequencing era has been assigning functions to the hundreds of thousands of noncoding sequence elements within our nuclear genome that are homologous to sequences in other species. These snippets of DNA have been hypothesized to impart information for initiating DNA replication, for inter- and intrachromosomal recombination, for structural integration of the genome into the surrounding nucleoskeleton, and for transcriptional regulation of gene expression. The latter regulatory elements have been of particular interest inasmuch as variations among our own species, and to some extent between species, are thought largely to be a function of differences in the timing, duration, and intensity of gene expression. Moreover, the explosive rise in single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) association studies has generated a mounting number of noncoding SNPs whose functions, while poorly defined at this time, will undoubtedly include the regulation of gene expression.1 Finally, the continued discovery of regulatory elements controlling gene expression will augment our "genomic tool box" of reagents for expressing and inactivating genes in a context-dependent manner. Elucidating the function of all regulatory elements in our genome is therefore a critically important endeavor from both a clinical and basic science perspective.
The 3 muscle types display unique patterns of gene expression; however, during development and in some pathological states there is overlap in gene expression profiles suggesting a common mode of regulation (Figure 1). For example, the majority
Related Article:
Circ. Res. 2008 103: 61-69.