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Adult hearts have inherently limited regenerative capabilities, such that injury results in lasting damage. The situation is different in neonatal mouse hearts, however, where a new study reveals a role for the immunomodulatory PD-1–PD-L1 pathway in regulating regeneration after injury.
High-throughput sequencing technologies have revolutionized the study of transcription across cell types and many biological phenomena. Brash et al. have developed a resource based on 240 endothelial bulk RNA-sequencing datasets that uses machine learning to predict whether a gene is the product of leaky or active transcription.
Human pluripotent stem cells have been shown to be important models for interrogating the molecular basis for heart disease. This review highlights the contributions of these models to our understanding of inherited arrhythmia syndromes, with a focus on integrating mechanistic and genome-wide association study data.
Acute depletion of meningeal lymphatic vessels impairs the clearance of cerebrospinal fluid and brain macromolecules. A new study by Antila et al. shows that amyloid pathology in Alzheimer’s disease is neither improved nor aggravated by genetic expansion or depletion of meningeal lymphatic vessels.
Antila et al. show that brain amyloid-β load is not significantly affected by sustained dural lymphatic vessel atrophy or hyperplasia induced by lymphangiogenic growth factor manipulation in two mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease.
Brash et al. created the BulkECexplorer, an online tool based on 240 endothelial bulk RNA-seq datasets, which predicts active or leaky gene expression in five vascular endothelial cell subtypes.
Piollet, Porsch et al. report that the myeloid receptor TREM2 limits necrotic core formation in atherosclerosis and controls key atherosclerosis-related functions of macrophages, such as efferocytosis, lipid uptake and foam cell survival.
Hepatocytes are recognized as having a primary role in production and clearance of apolipoprotein B100-containing lipoproteins. A new study finds that Kupffer cells can respond to the initial atherogenic dyslipidemia and regulate levels of circulating lipoprotein.
Although anti-inflammatory drugs have shown promising results in preclinical cardiovascular research, they have yielded little benefit in clinical trials. Before we can expect positive outcomes, we need to find ways of stratifying patients based on their infectious, inflammatory and autoimmune profile, and identify the right time of treatment.
Using two complementary approaches to induce hypercholesterolemia in mice, Di Nunzio, Hellberg, Zhang, Ahmed et al. identified liver macrophages as key cells that organize the systemic responses to lipoproteins during the initial phases of atherosclerosis pathogenesis.
Ahmed, Nguyen et al. show that two FDA-approved antibiotics, paromomycin and neomycin, promote cardiomyocyte proliferation and improve cardiac function after myocardial infarction in mice and pigs by interfering with the cell division inhibiting function of transcription factors Meis1 and Hoxb13.
Older men with loss of the Y chromosome are more susceptible to heart failure but the responsible genes have not been identified. A study now shows that loss of a single Y chromosome gene in bone marrow cells induces heart failure by switching cardiac macrophages from an inflammatory to a fibrogenic pattern of gene activity.
Recent analyses of observational data from 340,000 UK Biobank participants indicate that people with a higher biological age than their same-aged peers have an increased risk of developing cardiometabolic diseases. By contrast, the ability of accelerated biological aging to predict multimorbidity progression is relatively limited.
Horitani, Chavkin et al. report that the loss of the Y chromosome in macrophages from failing human hearts correlates with cardiac fibroblast activation and that the deficiency of a single Y chromosome gene, Uty, triggers an epigenetic rewiring in macrophages toward a profibrotic phenotype and increases cardiac fibrosis and dysfunction that can be prevented by TGFβ-neutralizing antibodies.
Motivated by a CRISPR screen, in vitro and in vivo studies identified an essential role for the bromodomain and extraterminal domain (BET) family member BRD4 in the differentiation of second heart field progenitors into cardiomyocytes. Single-cell transcriptomic studies showed that BRD4 deficiency affects a specific subset of cardiac progenitor cells.
Cardiometabolic multimorbidity — the coexistence of type 2 diabetes, ischemic heart disease or stroke — is a growing clinical and public health challenge. Accelerated biological aging, measured by clinical traits, provides innovative clues into subclinical prevention of cardiometabolic multimorbidity and mortality among older adults.