Cardiac Fibrosis in Dilated Cardiomyopathy: Transcriptomics Insights, Histological Correlations, and Organoid Model Verifications [RNA-seq I]

Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) represents a leading cause of heart failure among younger adults. Despite endomyocardial biopsy (EMB) transcriptome enriching our understanding of DCM, the link between its gene expression and phenotype remains unclear. RNA-seq analysis of 58 DCM samples and 12 publicly available control samples unveiled about 25,000 transcripts. A principal component analysis highlighted a distinct DCM-control separation. WGCNA revealed four transcriptome modules strongly associated with DCM. The purple module, which is the DCM-related module, was enriched with fibrosis-related genes and showed FSTL3 as a pivotal DCM-associated gene.