Long non-coding RNAs in heart failure: an obvious lnc.

Heart failure is a life-threatening and costly ailment characterized by structural and functional impairment of the heart. Despite major advances in understanding protein-mediated transcriptional control and signaling pathways that underlie the cellular and interstitial alterations of heart failure, significant therapeutical breakthroughs for innovative treatments of this disease are still missing. The recent extensive profiling of the mammalian transcriptome has revealed a large number of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) that play a diversity of important regulatory roles in gene expression. In here, we focus on a recent work by Ounzain and colleagues comprising genome-wide profiling of the cardiac transcriptome after myocardial infarction with an emphasis on the identification of novel heart-specific lncRNAs.