Functional importance of cardiac enhancer-associated noncoding RNAs in heart development and disease.

ABSTRACT: The key information processing units within gene regulatory networks are enhancers. Enhancer activity is associated with the production of tissue-specific noncoding RNAs, yet the existence of such transcripts during cardiac development has not been established. Using an integrated genomic approach, we demonstrate that fetal cardiac enhancers generate long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) during cardiac differentiation and morphogenesis. Enhancer expression correlates with the emergence of active enhancer chromatin states, the initiation of RNA polymerase II at enhancer loci and expression of target genes. Orthologous human sequences are also transcribed in fetal human hearts and cardiac progenitor cells. Through a systematic bioinformatic analysis, we identified and characterized, for the first ti

SUBMITTER: Ounzain S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4445080 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature