The people behind the papers – Irfan Kathiriya and Benoit Bruneau

The heart's atria and ventricles have different functions and developmental origins, and common cardiac defects have specific effects on each chamber. However, the gene regulatory networks (GRN) that govern their specification - and how this goes awry in genetic heart diseases - remain unclear. In a new study, Irfan Kathiriya, Benoit Bruneau and colleagues address these outstanding questions by using epigenomic analyses to define the GRN of atrial and ventricular cardiomyocytes derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells. In doing so, they identify TBX5 as a key regulator of the GRN governing atrial cell type specification and a potential therapeutic target for genetic atrial diseases. To learn more about this study and the people behind it, we talked to corresponding author Benoit Bruneau, and both first and corresponding author Irfan Kathiriya, Professor of Anesthesia at the University of California, San Francisco, USA.