Genetic and Genomic Research of Cardiovascular Diseases

Dear Colleagues,

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) remain a major life-threatening issue worldwide. The pathogenesis of CVDs is closely related to environmental factors and genetic background. As the majority of CVDs, however, are polygenic, many genetic and genomic studies have been conducted in recent decades to elucidate the individual differences in the pathophysiological mechanisms of CVDs. Genome-wide association studies have uncovered evidence of hundreds of cardiovascular loci associated with different CVD phenotypes, but there is a need to combine these data with sequencing data. Missense, rare, and common variants need to be integrated in clinically applicable tools.  However, components of regulatory mechanisms in gene expression/function that are changed in CVD tissue and related to environmental stimuli are still missing, but epigenetic studies have started to explain this. The majority of our genome is non-coding, and recent data suggest a role of long non-coding (LncRNA) and micro RNA (miRNA) as small non-coding RNAs in the regulation of gene expression. The search for new biomarkers in CV medicine was recently widened with the discovery of exosomes/extracellular vesicles (EVs), biologically functional cargo that transmit mRNA and microRNA to other cells and regulate the genetic signature during both physiological and pathological processes in CVDs.

This Special Issue welcomes up-to-date original research studies on genetic and epigenetic alteration and other critical modifiers of gene expression, including systematic reviews of the genetic or genomic research in CVD, in order to summarize knowledge on risk prediction, diagnosis, or therapeutic interventions by proposing next-generation platforms. Integration of different areas of genetic research will shed light on the missing heritability in CVD genomic background.

Dr. Aleksandra Stankovic
Guest Editor

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• cardiovascular diseases
• genome-wide association studies (GWASs)
• next-generation sequencing (NGS)
• whole-exome/genome sequencing
• gene expression
• mRNA
• microRNA
• genotype
• phenotype
• haplotype
• common variant
• rare variant
• human
• animal models
• cell models
• organoids
• exosomes/extracellular vesicles (EVs)
• RNA
• Circular RNA
• ncRNA
• long non-coding RNA
• vesicle