Transcriptomic insights into heart development and cardiovascular diseases

Abstract

The heart is a complex organ that starts to function by the end of the third week of gestation. Cardiovascular diseases attribute to the leading causes of death globally. The explosion of technological advances and computational tools for the analysis of next generation sequencing data has opened new avenues for comprehending the underlying regulatory mechanisms of complex disorders. The transcriptomic and genomic aspects of genes, non-coding RNAs and transcription factors have largely assisted understanding cardiogenesis and cardiovascular disease. The widespread application of transcriptomic methods has assisted in the screening of huge number of differentially expressed non-coding RNAs and their projected role as therapeutic targets and biomarkers. Transcriptomic profiling, including techniques such as RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) has enabled the comprehensive characterization of gene expression patterns at various stages of embryonic and postnatal heart development. In the context of cardiac diseases, transcriptomic analyses have provided unprecedented insights into the molecular alterations associated with conditions such as myocardial infarction, heart failure, arrhythmias, and congenital heart defects. This review presents an overview of recent advancements in transcriptomic research aimed at unraveling the intricate genetic and molecular networks governing heart development, as well as in cardiac diseases. In this review, we attempted to systematically review the transcriptomic experiments performed to identify significant genes, miRNAs and lncRNAs with biomarkers therapeutic potential, meta-analysis of multiple samples, and ceRNA networks in heart diseases.