The SVENSSON Lab
CHICAGO
INSTITUTE FOR
CARDIOVASCULAR RESEARCH
Investigating the Mechanisms that Regulate Cardiac Development to Improve our Understanding of Human Congenital Heart Disease
Eric Svensson, M.D., Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Medicine
Co-Director, Physician Scientist Development Program
Contact Information:
AMB G-611, MC 6088
5841 S. Maryland Ave
Chicago, IL 60637
Phone: (773) 834-0313
FAX: (773) 702-2681
E-mail:
Our general research interest is to further our understanding of the transcriptional regulation of cardiac development with the expectation that this will lead to an improved understanding of the molecular basis of congenital heart disease. Further, elucidation of the transcriptional regulation of heart formation may also suggest potential strategies to repair a heart damaged by a myocardial infarction and lead to novel insights into the origins of cardiac stem cells.
Significant progress has been made in the last decade in elucidating the molecular mechanisms regulating cardiac morphogenesis, but this process is still only partially understood. To date, only a limited number of genes have been identified that play a role in the transcriptional regulation of heart development. Mutations in several of these genes have now been shown to cause human congenital heart disease. We have previously identified a gene critical for normal heart development called FOG-2, a member of the FOG family of transcriptional modulators that also includes FOG-1 and U-shaped. FOG-2 functions as a transcriptional co-repressor by physically associating with GATA4, a cardiac-enriched transcriptional activator. We have found that mice with a targeted disruption of the FOG-2 gene die in mid-gestation from cardiac failure secondary to cardiac malformations. We have also found that FOG genes are required for zebrafish cardiac development, suggesting that the transcriptional pathways regulating cardiac development are conserved across vertebrates. Taken together, these results demonstrate the importance of FOG-2 in cardiogenesis and suggest that transcriptional repression, in addition to activation, plays a critical role in cardiac development. Ongoing work in the lab is directed toward identifying the transcriptional pathways regulating FOG-2 expression and characterizing the molecular mechanism responsible for FOG-2’s transcriptional repression.
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