doi: 10.1161/01.RES.0000134760.93885.3a
© 2004 American Heart Association, Inc.
Editorials |
First Annual Symposium of the American Heart Association Council on Basic Cardiovascular Sciences
Stress Signals, Molecular Targets, and the Genome
From the Center for Cardiovascular Development, Departments of Medicine, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Tex.
Correspondence to Dr Michael D. Schneider, Center for Cardiovascular Development, Baylor College of Medicine, One Baylor Plaza, Room 506D, Houston, TX 77030. E-mail michaels@bcm.tmc.edu
Key Words: stress signals • genomics • molecular targets • basic cardiovascular science
An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract. |
The completed sequence of a human genome, alongside increasingly those of model organisms, in rank of use and tractability, lays before the investigator the raw matter of inherited biology in stark and exquisite reductionist detail. At the dawn of our millennium, this newly arrived state of knowledge—omniscience, with respect to sequence—set into place the concatenation of new questions and bracing opportunities deemed the "postgenomic" era. What genes serve what functions, when, where, and how? (Even the most optimistic among us dispenses with "why?") At a higher level of complexity, what networks of genes serve what functions, and how are these coordinated? How, too, do proteins relate, not just pairwise but in intricate webs of physical associations, counting in the thousands or many tens of thousands? In other words, broad-band biology.
For the cardiovascular sciences, long-separate strands of work converged in recent years, in significant part, because of the shared enabling technologies. Biochemical and biophysical studies of heart-expressed proteins and their genes, including the changes in expression in disease or early heart formation, and the functional changes imparted by mutations, moved increasingly from molecules to cells to gene-modified mice, to engineering other species, and even to rational gene- and cell-based therapies for humans. Conversely, traditional whole-animal studies (the integrative physiology of circulation) responded with equal alacrity to the newly doable: "down-sizing" cath and noninvasive laboratories to take on the mouse, mouse embryo, and transparent zebrafish. From bench to beast, and vice versa.
Five years ago, this convergence resulted in council fusion—the