Friday 16 March 2018 | 12:00 noon
Institute of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology, University of Freiburg, GERMANY
Dynamics of the epigenome in cardiac myocyte development and disease
(Host: M. Giacca)
Signal transduction mechanisms, transcription factors and non-coding RNA networks essential for differentiation and remodeling of cardiac myocytesin disease have been uncovered. However,reshaping of the epigenome of human cardiacmyocytes during fetal development, postnatal maturation and in disease remains only partially known. This seminar will provide insight into recent developments into mechanisms and dynamics of DNA methylation, histone modifications and chromatin structure in cardiac myocytes in vitroand in vivo.
Prenatal development and postnatal maturation are characterized by a cooperation ofactive DNA methylation and histone marks at cis-regulatory regions to shape the cardiac myocyte transcriptome. Notably, cardiac myocytes contain more than 100,000 cis-regulatory regions which can be identified by their epigenome signature.One important challenge is to identify the interactions and molecular players connecting regulatory regions with cardiac myocyte genes in heart development and disease.