Nature Communications (Aug 2019)

WWP2 regulates pathological cardiac fibrosis by modulating SMAD2 signaling

  • Huimei Chen,
  • Aida Moreno-Moral,
  • Francesco Pesce,
  • Nithya Devapragash,
  • Massimiliano Mancini,
  • Ee Ling Heng,
  • Maxime Rotival,
  • Prashant K. Srivastava,
  • Nathan Harmston,
  • Kirill Shkura,
  • Owen J. L. Rackham,
  • Wei-Ping Yu,
  • Xi-Ming Sun,
  • Nicole Gui Zhen Tee,
  • Elisabeth Li Sa Tan,
  • Paul J. R. Barton,
  • Leanne E. Felkin,
  • Enrique Lara-Pezzi,
  • Gianni Angelini,
  • Cristina Beltrami,
  • Michal Pravenec,
  • Sebastian Schafer,
  • Leonardo Bottolo,
  • Norbert Hubner,
  • Costanza Emanueli,
  • Stuart A. Cook,
  • Enrico Petretto

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-11551-9
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10, no. 1
pp. 1 – 19

Abstract

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Pathological cardiac fibrosis is a hallmark of diseases leading to heart failure. Here, the authors used systems genetics to identify a pro-fibrotic gene network regulated by WWP2, a E3 ubiquitin ligase, which orchestrates the nucleocytoplasmic shuttling and transcriptional activity of SMAD2 in the diseased heart.