Studies On Heart Developmental Candidate Gene ZNF569

Cardiovascular diseases have become one of the two kinds of most serious diseases that threaten human beings. It is a critical prerequisite to understand the normal progress of cardiovascular development and the mechanisms underlying the causes of this kind of diseases, so it is possible to cure the disease. As it known, mistakes in spatiotemporal expression of critical genes result in congenital cardiovascular diseases. Furthermore, studies on high risk population of cardiovascular disease have also suggested the relationship between noncongenital cardiovascular diseases and genetic factors. In order to promote our understanding for cardiovascular development and to discover the molecular regulatory mechanisms during this progress, our laboratory performed a large scale scanning project to search and clone cardiac developmental candidate genes.In the present study, we report the identification and characterization of a novel KRAB-containing zinc-finger protein, ZNF569, from a human embryonic heart cDNA library. ZNF569 encodes a putative protein of 686 amino acids. The protein is conserved across different species during evolution. Northern blot analysis indicates that ZNF569 is expressed in heart, liver, placenta, muscles, and pancreas and in a very embryonic development-specific stage of human tissues, including heart, pancreas,...