Chronic and acute stress to the heart results in a pathological remodeling response accompanied by hypertrophy, fibrosis, myocyte apoptosis and eventual death from pump failure and arrhythmias. While genome-wide transcriptome analysis on diseased tissues has greatly advanced our understanding of the regulatory networks that drive pathological changes in the heart, this approach has been disadvantaged by the fact that the signals are derived from tissue homogenates inherently diluting local or cellular signals. Recent developments in RNA amplification strategies provide the opportunity to use small amounts of input RNA for genome-wide sequencing.
We have used single-cell sequencing to obtain a genome-wide gene expression to identify new factors involved in different aspects of cardiac remodeling. In doing so we were able to identify key regulators of cardiac remodeling during different types of heart disease.
Together these studies underscore the power of single cell sequencing analysis which will undoubtedly have far reaching implications for improving our understanding of cardiac biology and disease.