Cardiovascular Medicine

Biography

Biography: Yaping Tian

Abstract

Atherosclerosis is a chronic, progressive, inflammatory disease with a long asymptomatic phase. Therefore, early finding of the risks of atherosclerosis, and then changing one’s lifestyle, preventing and treating the disease at an early stage are very important. Finding sensitive and no invasive biomarkers of atherosclerosis in blood is necessary. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a group of small, noncoding regulatory RNAs. They could inversely regulate the expression of their target genes at the post-transcriptional level by inhibiting translation or causing the degradation of the target messenger RNA (mRNA). miRNAs play a crucial role in the development of animals, by regulating the formation of tissues and organs. Previous studies have demonstrated that miRNAs are present in clinical samples of plasma and serum in a remarkably stable form, and they are often regulated in a tissue- and pathology specific manner. The use of circulating miRNAs as clinical biomarkers has generated great interest. Solexa sequencing followed by bioinformatics analysis have been used to predict the novel miRNAs in control individuals (n=15), coronary disease (AS) patients (n=15) and unstable angina pectoris (UAP) patients (n=15). Four miRNAs were discovered and validated in large scale number of clinical blood sample. All of them have been registered in microRNA database (http://mirbase.org). The bioinformatics analysis suggested that most of them might be involved in the disease process, including the regulation of Rho protein signal transduction, cell migration, and the induction of apoptosis.