How a common genetic risk variant may contribute to arrhythmia

Lifestyle and environmental factors play a central role in cardiovascular disease. Yet the interactions of environmental factors and the significant genetic components underpinning cardiovascular disease remain unclear. Researchers recently used a hydrogel with controllable stiffness to show how a common genetic risk variant for cardiovascular disease contributes, on activation by mechanical stress, to cardiac-rhythm dysfunction. Similar bioengineering approaches using patient-specific stem cells could help uncover the functional roles of the more-than-a-million genetic variants that have been linked to cardiovascular disease. The study, which was partly funded by the NHLBI, was published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering