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Getting Personal: Omics of the Heart


Jan 28, 2019

Jane Ferguson:                Hello, welcome to Getting Personal: Omics of the Heart, Episode 22. This is a podcast from Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine, and the AHA Council on Genomic and Precision Medicine. I am Jane Ferguson and it's November 2018.

                                           Our first article comes from Carlos Vanoye, Alfred George and colleagues from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and is entitled, High Throughput Functional Evaluation of KCNQ1 Decrypts Variance of Unknown Significance.

                                           So a major growing problem in clinical genomics is that following the identification of a variant that is potentially linked to a disease phenotype, without further interrogation, it's really hard to make sense of the functional significance of that variant. Right now, the large number of variants of unknown significance lead to confusion for patients and clinicians alike. To allow for accurate diagnoses and the best treatment plans, we need a way to be able to screen variants to assess their function in a fast and cost-effective manner.

                                           In this paper, the authors decided to focus in the KCNQ1 gene, a cardiac ion channel, which can affect arrhythmias. They aim to assess whether a novel high-throughput functional evaluation strategy could identify functional mutations, as well as an in vitro electrophysiological approach. Which is effective, but expensive and time-consuming. Their approach capitalized on an existing automated electrophysiological recording platform that had originally had been developed for drug discovery essays.

                                           They selected 78 variants in KCNQ1 and assessed their function using the High-Throughput platform, which coupled high efficiency, cell electroporation with automated plain or patch clamp recording. They compared the results to traditional electrophysiological essays and find a high rate of concordance between the two methods. Overall, they were able to reclassify over 65% of the variants tested, with far greater efficiency than traditional methods.

                                           While this method will not work for all genes and phenotypes, the authors have demonstrated an efficient method for functional interrogation of variants. Which may greatly accelerate discovery and conditions such as Long QT or other congenital arrhythmias.

                                           The next paper, Nocturnal Atrial Fibrillation Caused by Mutations in KCND2 Encoding Poor Forming Alpha Subunit of the Cardiac KV 4.2 Potassium Channel, comes from Max Drabkin, Ohad Birk, and colleagues at Soroka University Medical Center in Israel. This paper also focuses on cardiac ion channels and the role of mutations in atrial fibrillation.

                                           In a family with early-onset peroxisomal AF across three generations, whole XM sequencing revealed a variant in KCND2 encoding the KV 4.2 Potassium Channel, which segregated consistent with autosomal dominant heredity. This variant resulted in a replacement of a conserved [inaudible] residue with an arginine. To investigate functional consequences of this novel variant, they conducted experiments in xenopos laevis oocytes and found that there is decreased voltage depended channel and activation and impaired formation of the KV 4.2 Homotetramer and the KV 4.2, KV 4.3 Heterotetramer.

                                           Overall, this study shows that a novel mutation in a conserved Protein kinase C Phosphorylation site within the KV 4.2 Potassium Channel underlies the phenotypes observed in a family of peroxisomal atrial fibrillation. The targeting Atrial KV 4.2 might be an effective therapeutic avenue.

                                           Next up, Michael Levin and Scott Damrauer and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania published an article entitled, Genomic Risks Stratification Predicts All-Cause Mortality After Cardiac Catheterization.

                                           They were interested in understanding the utility of polygenic risk scores for disease prediction. They constructed a genome Y genetic risk score for CAD and applied it to individuals from the Penn Medicine Bio-bank who had undergone Coronary angiography and genotyping.

                                           They included over 139,000 variants for the 1,500 ancestry subjects who were included and classified them as high or low polygenic risk. Individuals who were classified as high polygenic risk were shown to have higher risk of All-Cause mortality than low polygenic risk individuals despite no differences in traditional risk factor profiles. This was particularly evident in individuals with high genetic risk but no evidence of angiographic CAD.

                                           Adding the polygenic risk score to a traditional risk assessment model was able to improve prediction of five year All-Cause mortality. Highlighting the utility of a polygenic score and underscoring traditional risk factors do not yet fully capture mortality risk.

                                           The next article entitled, "Bio-marker Glycoprotein Acetyls is Associated with the Risk of A Wide Spectrum of Incident Diseases and Stratifies Mortality Risk in Angiography Patients" comes from Johannes Kettunen, Scott Ritchie, Peter Würtz and colleagues from the University of Oulu Finland.

                                           GlycA is a circulating biomarker that reflects the amount of Glycated proteins in the circulation. It has been associated with cardiovascular disease, Type 2 Diabetes, and all-cause mortality. In this paper, the authors used electronic health record data from over 11,000 adults from the finish general population previously included in the "FINRISK" and "Dilgom" studies and they tested for a associations between GlycA and 468 different health outcomes over an 8-12 year follow up. They report new associations between GlycA and multiple conditions including incident alcoholic liver disease, chronic renal failure, glomerular diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, inflammatory polyarthric disease and hypertension.

                                           These associations held true even after adjusting for CRP suggesting that GlycA represents an independent biological contributor to inflammation and disease. Their findings highlight potential utility for GlycA as a biomarker of many diseases and underscore the importance future functional and mechanistic studies to understand how GlycA is linked to disease risk.

                                           Our last original research article entitled, "Tissue Specific Differential Expression of Novel Jeans and Long Intergenic Non-coding RNAs in Humans with Extreme Response to Endotoxic glycemia comes from Jane Ferguson, Murdock Riley, and colleagues from Vanderbilt University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania. That first author is none other than me, so I'm not unbiased reader of this particular manuscript, but I'd like to tell you a little bit about it anyway.

                                           We were interested in understanding the transcriptional changes that occur in tissues during acute inflammation. As part of the genetics of evoked responses to Niacin and Endotoxemia, or gene study, we recruited healthy individuals and performed an inpatient endotoxin challenge where we administered a low dose of LPS and looked at the systemic inflammatory response. Individuals vary greatly in the degree of their inflammatory response to LPS and we identified high and low responders, men and women, of African and European ancestry, who had responses in the top or bottom 10% for cytokines and fever.

                                           We conducted RNA seek and adipose tissue in 25 individuals and CD-14 positive monosites for 15 individuals in pre and two or four hours post LPS samples. We found that the differences in transcriptional response between high or low responders are mostly explained by magnitude rather than discrete sets of genes.

                                           So some core genes were altered similarly, in both groups, but overall the high responders mounted a large transcription of response to LPS or low responders rather than mounting an anti-inflammatory response actually just barely responded on the transcription level. We saw clear tissue specificity between manosites and adipose tissue we identified several long non-coding RNAs that were up or down regulated in response to LPS and validated these independent samples one of these link RNAs which we have now named Monosite LPs induced link RNA regulator vile six or Mahler Isle six, with highly regulated by LPs and monosites but not in adipose tissue.

                                           We [inaudible] THP-1 monosites and find a significant effect on iOS six expression suggesting that this is a novel link RNA that regulates Isle six expression in manosites potentially through a cd-86 dependent pathway. Overall our data revealed tissue specific transcriptional of changes that correlate with clinical inflammatory responses and highlight the role of specifically incarnate and inflammatory response.

                                           Next up is a research letter entitled "Reduced Sodium Current in Native Cardiomyocytes of a Regatta Syndrome Patient Associated with Beta Two Central Mutation" published by Constance Schmidt, Felix Wiedmann, Ibrahim El-Battrawy, Dierk Thomas, and co-authors from University Hospital Heidelberg. They obtained cardiomyocytes from a patient with Regatta Syndrome previous whole XM sequencing had implicated a variant in the Beta Two Syntrophin or "SNTB2" gene as potentially causal in this individual. Expression analysis showed lower SNTB2 expression and atrial tissue of the affected individual compared with controls.

                                           They performed electrophysiology on the Microcytes and found reduced peak sodium density and reduced late sodium current. They co-express wild type or mutant SNTB2 in heck 293 T cells and [inaudible] with the cardiac sodium channel NAV-1.5 and found a significant effect on binding which adversely affected sodium currents. This study nicely demonstrates the functional effect of this SNTB2 mutation underlying Regatta Syndrome in this patient.

                                           A second research letter comes from A.T. van den Hoven and Jolien Roos- Hesselink and colleagues from Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands and is entitled "Aortic Dimensions and Clinical Outcome in Patients with SMAD three mutations, they were interested in understanding how the Aortic dilation comment individuals with SMAD three mutations compared to individuals with other syndrome and causes of Aortic dilation.

                                           In 28 patients with SMAD three mutations, there were significant growth in the Sinotubular Junction the ascending Aorta on the diaphragm over an average of 10 years of follow up at reads far higher population averages but lower than might be seen in other syndromes, such as [inaudible]. Intensive management and preventive surgery and many of the patients prevented any mortality in this group.

                                           Rounding out this issue is a clinical letter entitled "Concealed Arrhythmogenic  Right Ventricular Cardiomyopathy in Sudden unexplained Cardiac Death events from Jodie Ingles, Chris Semsarian, and colleagues from the University of Sydney, Australia. They report on for clinical cases where individuals presented in early adulthood with unexplained cardiac arrest, which was later found to be attributable to mutations in the PKP2 gene. PKP2 or, Plakophilin 2, encodes an integral component of the Desmosome, which is important and Cell-Cell adhesion. Further PKP2 is involved in transcriptional activation of genes controlling intracellular calcium cycling. This gene has been implicated arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy in individuals with cardiac structural abnormalities. These four cases where unrelated individuals were all fans to have loss of function variants and PKP2 underlying sudden cardiac death or events, despite structurally normal hearts. This prompts questions on the clinical management of such cases of concealed ARVC.

                                           That's all from us for November, thanks to all of you out there listening. We'll be back in December for the final episode of 2018.

                                           This podcast was brought to you by Circulation Genomic and Precision Medicine and the American Heart Association Council on Genomic and Precision Medicine. This program is copyright American Heart Association 2018.