ABSTRACT

Objective: To check which of the eight pro-hypertrophic transcription factors bind in abundance to a set of 140 functionally confirmed cardiac enhancers aiming to identify potential therapeutic targets for delaying the onset of cardiac hypertrophy.
Study Design: Bioinformatics, in-Silico Study.
Place and Duration of Study: The study was conducted at the Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Medical Sciences (NUMS), Rawalpindi, Pakistan, from January 2022 to December 2022.
Methods: For experimentally verified human and mouse noncoding regions with gene enhancer activity measured in transgenic mice, VISTA Enhancer Browser was used to obtain 140 cardiac-specific functionally confirmed enhancers. Among these enhancers, transcription factor binding sites were computationally mapped to assess transcription factor occupancy. The binding sites for all eight transcription factors were screened in the collective set of 140 cardiac enhancers via an in-house script.
Results: In this study, among a small set of eight pro-hypertrophic transcription factors, occupancy of transcription factor HAND (Heart- And Neural Crest Derivatives-Expressed Protein) was found to be maximum in the collected pool of functionally confirmed cardiac enhancers.
Conclusion: The transcription factor HAND was found to have maximum binding occupancy among a set of experimentally confirmed cardiac enhancers.

Keywords: Cardiac Hypertrophy, Enhancers, Gene Regulation, Transcription Factors.

How to cite this: Raza RZ, Hussain I, Akhtar F, Mumtaz S. The Binding Occupancy of Pro-Hypertrophic Transcription Factors among Cardiac Developmental Enhancers. Life and Science. 2024; 5(1): 22-26. doi: http://doi.org/10.37185/LnS.1.1.464