Mouse Models
Rat Model
Why mouse model systems?
Early studies of different interventions to induce hypertrophy and heart failure were performed in rats. However, through the advent of transgenic and gene-targeting techniques to create clinically relevant disease models and the miniaturization of physiological techniques to evaluate cardiac phenotypes, the mouse has emerged as the most studied model system. Genetically engineered mouse models allow us to identify genes that are causative for heart failure and to evaluate the molecular mechanisms responsible for its development and progression.
Most of the animal models used in Project 1 are well established and their cardiac phenotypes have been extensively characterized. We will monitor differential gene activity and its time course in genetic and non-genetic models of cardiac hypertrophy, exercise myocardial infarction, cardiomyopathy, and myocarditis under well-controlled experimental conditions.
The rationale for analyzing a broad spectrum of experimentally induced and genetically engineered models of cardiac adaptation and dysfunction is not only that these animals might replicate, at least in part, a distinct class of human diseases. They also allow differentiating among the multiple processes that cause hypertrophy and congestive heart failure. Our aim is to identify patterns of gene expression that are either common for these diseases or specific for a certain subset of conditions.
Participants
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