Reactivation of fetal gene expression patterns has been implicated in common
cardiac diseases in adult life including left ventricular (LV) hypertrophy
(LVH) in arterial hypertension. Thus, increased wall stress and neurohumoral
activation are discussed to induce the return to expression of fetal genes
after birth in LVH. We therefore aimed to identify novel potential candidates
for LVH by analyzing fetal-adult cardiac gene expression in a genetic rat
model of hypertension, i.e. the stroke-prone spontaneously hypertensive rat
(SHRSP). To this end we performed genome-wide transcriptome analysis in SHRSP
to identify differences in expression patterns between day 20 of fetal
development (E20) and adult animals in week 14 in comparison to a normotensive
rat strain with contrasting low LV mass, i.e. Fischer (F344). 15232 probes
were detected as expressed in LV tissue obtained from rats at E20 and week 14
(p < 0.05) and subsequently screened for differential expression. We
identified 24 genes with SHRSP specific up-regulation and 21 genes with down-
regulation as compared to F344. Further bioinformatic analysis presented
Efcab6 as a new candidate for LVH that showed only in the hypertensive SHRSP
rat differential expression during development (logFC = 2.41, p < 0.001) and
was significantly higher expressed in adult SHRSP rats compared with adult
F344 (+ 76%) and adult normotensive Wistar-Kyoto rats (+ 82%). Thus, it
represents an interesting new target for further functional analyses and the
elucidation of mechanisms leading to LVH. Here we report a new approach to
identify candidate genes for cardiac hypertrophy by combining the analysis of
gene expression differences between strains with a contrasting cardiac
phenotype with a comparison of fetal-adult cardiac expression patterns