Enhancer Dynamics for Gene Regulation in the Cardiovascular System

Enhancers are regulatory DNA sequences that increase the transcription of a target gene when bound by transcription factors. Decades of research endeavors have shed light on the crucial roles of enhancers in cardiovascular development and disease. Besides working as cis-regulatory elements, enhancers also play critical roles in transactivating mechanisms such as enhancer RNA transcription and transcriptional condensates. Technological advances, such as single-cell multiomics, CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)-based enhancer perturbation screens, and machine learning technologies, provide us with unprecedented opportunities to gain novel insights into the dynamic function of cardiovascular enhancers. In this brief review, we discuss cutting-edge techniques that are being or can be leveraged to fill knowledge gaps in studying cardiovascular enhancers. Like gene expression, enhancers display functional dynamics in concordance with specific cellular stress. We summarize the findings of inducible enhancer functions in the cardiovascular system. We also discuss several recent studies that are advancing our understanding of cardiovascular enhancer functions and are potentially paradigm-shifting. These insights have great potential to inform novel therapeutic strategies targeting enhancer-mediated gene dysregulation in cardiovascular disease.