Human atlas of cardiac promoters and enhancers reveals important role of regulatory elements in heritable diseases

Abstract

Genome regulatory elements play a critical role during cardiac development and maintenance of normal physiological homeostasis, and genome-wide association studies identified a large number of SNPs associated with cardiovascular diseases localized in intergenic zones. We used cap analysis of gene expression (CAGE) to identify transcription start sites (TSS) with one nucleotide resolution that effectively maps genome regulatory elements in a representative collection of human heart tissues. Here we present a comprehensive and fully annotated CAGE atlas of human promoters and enhancers from four chambers of the non-diseased human donor hearts, including both atria and ventricles. We have identified 10,528 novel regulatory elements, where 2,750 are classified as TSS and 4,258 novel enhancers, which were validated with ChIP-seq libraries and motif enrichment analysis. We found that heart-region specific expression patterns are primarily based on the alternative promoter and specific enhancer activity. Our study significantly increased evidence of the association of regulatory elements-located variants with heart morphology and pathologies. The precise location of cardiac disease-related SNPs within the regulatory regions and their correlation with a specific cell type offers a new understanding of genetic heart diseases.