Abstract
In Switzerland and other developed countries, heart diseases are the major cause of morbidity and mortality. The vast majority of our genome (98%) is non protein-coding but is pervasively transcribed in to non-coding RNAs including small (<200 nucleotides) and long (>200 nucleotides), the second class of which are described in this study. We suspect that these long non coding RNAs play a major role in gene regulation and are potentially important modulators of heart disease. They could be used as specific and sensitive biomarkers of pathological states. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed and compared the expression of a set of transposable elements associated lncRNAs in a mouse model of myocardial infarction. We noticed a variation in the expression of these lncRNAs between control mice and infarcted mice but at different temporal points post infarction and in different regions of the infracted mouse heart. With all these findings, we reveal a novel class of TE associated heart specific lncRNAs, which could be used as new biomarkers in myocardial infarction.