Hypertension, or elevated blood pressure, is a major risk factor for various cardiovascular, renal diseases, and stroke. The form of hypertension with no identifiable cause is referred to as Essential Hypertension. Familial studies indicate that Essential Hypertension is heritable and, thereby, classical genetic approaches have been applied on both human and other mammalian models of hypertension to map the locations of the allelic variants within quantitative trait loci for blood pressure. The post genome era has further elevated this area of research into large-scale genome-wide association studies of hypertension in humans. Collectively, these studies have resulted in the prioritization and cataloging of several genomic regions containing allelic variants as candidates linked or associated with essential hypertension. Further, they are providing evidence to suggest that the inheritance of hypertension is rather complex, encompassing multiple variants both within protein-coding and non-coding annotations, each of which may act independently or interactively with other genes and/or environmental factors to differentially regulate blood pressure. This book provides an overview of the various methods employed to study the genetics of hypertension and discuss the progress and prospects of this area of research that may contribute towards individualized clinical management of hypertension in the future.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Linkage Analyses for Essential Hypertension in Humans
Genome-wide Association Studies of Human Hypertension
Rat Models in Hypertension Research
Genetic Linkage Analysis Using Hypertensive Rat Models
Substitution Mapping Using Congenic Strains
Genome-Editing Tools for Rat Hypertension Research
Beyond Protein-Coding Genes – “Missing Heritability”
MicroRNA and Hypertension
Long Non-coding RNA and Hypertension
Gut Microbiota and Hypertension
Summary and Perspectives
References
Author Biographies
About the Author(s)
Xi Cheng, University of Toledo
Xi Cheng is a pre-doctoral fellow in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Toledo College of Medicine and Life Sciences. His research focus is in the area of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Diseases. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Bioengineering from the Fuzhou University Zhicheng College in China in 2012. Besides obtaining a Graduate Certificate in Bioinformatics and Biomarkers, since 2013, he has been researching with Dr. Bina Joe to investigate the contributions of non-coding RNAs to the inheritance of hypertension using novel congenic and gene-edited rat models of hypertension. He has been invited to deliver podium presentations of his research at various Research conferences including the 2015 Midwest Graduate Symposium held in Toledo, OH, USA and the 2015 Annual Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology meeting held in Boston, USA and the 42nd Annual Pharmacology Research Colloquium held in Toledo, OH, USA.
Bina Joe, University of Toledo
Bina Joe is a Professor and Chair of Physiology and Pharmacology and the founding Director of the Center for Hypertension and Personalized Medicine at the University of Toledo College of Medicine. She is also a Fellow of the American Heart Association and the Cardiovascular section of the American Physiological Society. She is an international leading authority in the research area of Genetics of Hypertension, and has identified several novel genetic factors linked to the inheritance of hypertension. She is the recipient of several Research Awards including the Young Scholar Award from the American Society of Hypertension, the Lewis K. Dahl Memorial Lecture Award from the American Heart Association Council on Hypertension and the Outstanding Researcher Award from the University of Toledo. Her research work is published in several toptier journals including PNAS, Cell and Nature Communications. Besides being an internationally recognized Researcher, she has taken on multiple leadership positions within the American Physiological Society and the American Heart Association. Notably, she has contributed substantially to the development of the Physiological Genomics group of the American Physiological Society and was recognized with a Distinguished Service Award. She has served on the Editorial Board of Hypertension and is the current Editor of the Journal, Physiological Genomics.
