Investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital have made a potentially exciting discovery by jumping into the abyss of the dark side of the genome. Once dismissed as “junk DNA,” roughly 75 percent of the human genome do not code for proteins. But these dark regions of the genome are far from junk—instead, they may hold tantalizing clues about disease states. A team of Brigham investigators led by Mark Feinberg, MD, of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, and an associate professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, recently plunged into these regions in search of clues about atherosclerosis—a disease in which the arteries become increasingly hardened and narrow, obstructing blood flow and leading to heart disease. Using a preclinical model of atherosclerosis, Feinberg and colleagues have uncovered a long, noncoding RNA (lncRNA) that may point the way toward new therapies for atherosclerosis and shed light on why the likelihood of the disease increases with age. Results are published in Science Translational Medicine.
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