To keep the heart and blood vessels healthy, many tiny processes inside our cells need to work together. A new study from the German Center for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK) shows that it’s not just our genes that matter, but also how our cells use energy and nutrients.
This connection between cell metabolism and gene activity helps explain how heart cells grow, age, and sometimes get sick.
The research was led by Professor Gergana Dobreva at the Mannheim Medical Faculty. Her team looked at how the byproducts of cell metabolism can affect which genes are turned on or off in heart cells.
This process is called epigenetics. It doesn’t change the genes themselves, but it changes how they are used. These changes are controlled by chemical signals in the cell.
One of the main discoveries in the study was about a protein called lamin A/C. This protein is usually known for helping the cell nucleus—the part of the cell that holds genetic material—keep its shape.
But the researchers found that lamin A/C also has another important job: it helps control how the body breaks down and uses an amino acid called cysteine. Cysteine comes from the food we eat and is part of many processes in the cell.
When lamin A/C is missing or not working correctly, the process of using cysteine becomes unbalanced. As a result, the cells make too much of a certain substance that can affect the chemical signals in the nucleus.
These signals, or epigenetic switches, can then turn on genes at the wrong time. This causes heart cells to grow the wrong way and lose their proper function.
There is some good news, though. The scientists were able to fix this problem by adjusting how the cells used cysteine. Once they did that, the gene activity returned to normal, and the heart cells began developing properly again.
The same was true in rare genetic conditions where lamin A/C is faulty. These conditions can cause people to age much faster than normal. When the metabolism was corrected in these cases, the heart cells worked better and showed less damage to their DNA.
This study proves that the way cells process nutrients can act like a control system for gene activity. This has a direct impact on how well the heart develops and how it ages.
Dr. Yinuo Wang, the lead author, explained that even though diseases caused by lamin A/C problems are rare, they can have serious effects. The team hopes to find new treatments to help these patients live better lives.
Professor Dobreva added that the study shows how basic gene control systems can be adjusted through changes in metabolism. This opens new doors for treating heart disease and age-related health problems in the future.
If you care about heart disease, please read studies that herbal supplements could harm your heart rhythm, and how eating eggs can help reduce heart disease risk.
For more health information, please see recent studies that apple juice could benefit your heart health, and results showing yogurt may help lower the death risks in heart disease.
The study is published in Nature Metabolism.
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