Emerging Field of Cardiomics: High-Throughput Investigations into Transcriptional Regulation of Cardiovascular Development and Disease

Congenital heart defects remain a leading cause of infant mortality in the western world, despite decades of research focusing on cardiovascular development and disease. With the recent emergence of several high-throughput technologies including RNA sequencing, chromatin-immunoprecipitation-coupled sequencing, mass-spectrometry-based proteomics analyses, and the numerous variations of these strategies, investigations into cardiac development have been transformed from candidate-based studies into whole-genome,-transcriptome, and -proteome undertakings. In this review, we discuss several reports that have emerged from our laboratory and others over the past 5 years that emphasize the versatility of large dataset-based investigations of cardiogenic transcription factors, from phenotypic validations and new gene implications to the identification of novel roles of well-studied transcriptional regulators.