Cardiovascular Genetics and Genomics for the Cardiologist

Genetics Primer for the General Cardiologist Functional Genomics Applied to Cardiovascular Medicine

Since completion of the draft sequence of the human genome in 2000, the landscape of biomedical research has undergone a rapid transformation. Growing knowledge of genome structure and variation has spawned the development of technologies that allow researchers to study thousands of genes, transcripts, and proteins simultaneously. This has expanded biomedical science beyond reductionist approac...

Recent developments in cardiovascular genetics and genomics.

Genetics Primer for the General Cardiologist

Not all patients respond to drug therapy in a uniform and beneficial fashion. The goal of this review is to describe the contribution of genetic variation to drug response, with a focus on drugs used in cardiovascular therapy. Genetic approaches used to analyze rare and common adverse effects as well as variability in efficacy are presented first. The challenges and potential solutions to incor...

Genetics Primer for the General Cardiologist Epigenetic Modifications Basic Mechanisms and Role in Cardiovascular Disease

The term epigenetics was first used to refer to the complex interactions between the genome and the environment that are involved in development and differentiation in higher organisms. Today, this term is used to refer to heritable alterations that are not due to changes in DNA sequence. Rather, epigenetic modifications, or tags, such as DNA methylation and histone modification, alter DNA acce...

Cardiovascular disease and sudden cardiac death: between genetics and genomics.

In 1980, polymorphic variance in the human genomewasused to generate a first, physical map allowing monogenic traits to be traced to certain chromosomal regions. Due to the recognition of fragment length polymorphisms (microsatellite markers) with several different alleles at the same chromosomal locus, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) became neglected in this instance for a long time. The...