Project description:The protein-coding gene networks regulating heart development are well known. Less understood are the roles of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), many of which are poorly conserved due to their origins from transposable elements (TEs) such as endogenous retroviruses (ERVs). Here, we report hundreds of ERV elements from the primate-specific MER41 family are expressed in pluripotent cell-derived cardiomyocytes and fetal heart, some of which are regulated by the cardiogenic transcription factor TBX5. The most significant of these are located within BANCR, an lncRNA exclusively expressed in primate fetal cardiomyocytes in normal physiology. Surprisingly, BANCR promotes cellular movement in fetal cardiomyocytes, which is due in part to Rho GTPase and ephrin receptor signaling. We postulate that ERV-derived BANCR is a recent evolutionary mechanism for enabling larger heart sizes in primates, and underscores the remarkable retroviral origins of humans.
Project description:The domestic ferret has recently been described as a uniformly lethal model of infection for three species of Ebolavirus known to be pathogenic to humans. Reagents to systematically analyze the ferret host response to infection are lacking; however, the recent publication of a draft ferret genome has opened the potential for transcriptional analysis of ferret models of disease. In this work, we present comparative analysis of longitudinally sampled blood taken from ferrets and non-human primates infected with lethal doses of the Makona strain of Zaire ebolavirus. Strong induction of proinflammatory and prothrombotic signaling programs were present in both ferrets and non-human primates and both transcriptomes were similar to previously published datasets of fatal cases of human Ebola virus infection.
