Emerging Molecular Mechanisms in Cardiovascular Physiology and Pathology

The transition of the myocardium from a normal physiological state to a pathological state is driven by dynamic molecular changes that include alterations to genetics and epigenetics. Traditionally, major focus for genetic and epigenetic research have been on physiologically relevant cell types including cardiomyocytes, endothelial cells and smooth muscle cells of the heart. Over the past decade, with rapid emergence of single cell sequencing technologies, much more cellular diversity within the heart as well as within the vascular microenvironment has been recognized, with strong pathological roles for fibroblasts and a variety of immune cells, particularly in the diseased heart. Moreover, complex cellular crosstalk between diverse cell populations within the myocardium as well as within the microvasculature as a critical mediator of pathological signaling has been proposed, mainly via communication through the release and exchange of extracellular vesicles (EV). There is increasing evidence that targeting of specific cell types such as immune cells or fibroblasts as well as EVs in the heart and its microvasculature may be effective in the clinic. However, precise molecular mechanisms by which different cell types of the heart and the microvasculature elicit function as well as the underlying means of communication between distinct cell types are mediated remain far from completely understood.

This Research Topic welcomes contributions that improves our understanding about the molecular mechanisms underlying cardiovascular physiology and pathology.

Potential areas of interest may include, but are not limited to:
● Role of endothelial cells and microvasculature in cardiac physiology and pathology
● Immune cell mediated mechanisms
● Cardiac and vascular metabolism
● Lipid signaling and the heart
● RNA-based mechanisms (miRNA, lncRNA, epitranscriptomics, scRNA-seq, RNA-binding protein etc.)
● EV-based mechanisms (exosomes, EV proteomics and transcriptomics, single EV analysis etc.)
● Epigenomics (DNA methylation, chromatin modifications etc.)
● Cell-Cell communication in arrhythmia generation
● Novel therapeutic approaches, EV-based and RNA-based vascular therapeutics
● Single cell transcriptomics for identifying novel cell-type and sub-type populations

We encourage the submission of different article types to this collection, especially reviews, mini-reviews, and original research papers. For a complete list of article types that can be considered, please follow this link. 

Even though abstract submission is not mandatory, we encourage all interested researchers to submit an abstract before submitting their manuscript. Abstracts do not have to coincide with the final abstract of the manuscripts.

Topic Editor Dr. Prabhu Mathiyalagan is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Benthos Prime Central (Houston,TX , USA). The other Topic Editors declare no conflicts of interest with regards to the Research Topic subject.