Guoping Li

Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School · Cardiovascular Research Center

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are a class of endogenous functional RNA generated by back-splicing. Recently, circRNAs have been found to have certain coding potential. Proteins/peptides translated from circRNAs play essential roles in various diseases. Here, we briefly summarize the basic knowledge and technologies that are usually applied to study circ...

Exercise training (ET) is an important non-drug adjuvant therapy against many human diseases, including cardiovascular diseases. The appropriate ET intensity induces beneficial adaptions and improves physiological function and cardiopulmonary fitness. The mechanisms of exercise-induced cardioprotective effects are still not fully understood. Howeve...

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are nanoscale membranous vesicles containing DNA, RNA, lipids, and proteins, which play versatile roles in intercellular communications. EVs are increasingly being recognized as the promising therapeutic agents for many diseases, including cardiocerebrovascular and metabolic diseases, due to their ability to deliver fun...

Simple Summary The role of exosomal non-coding RNA (ncRNA) in regulating macrophage polarization and the role of polarized macrophages as an important source of extracellular vesicles in cardiovascular diseases remains to be elucidated. In this review, we aim to summarize the role and molecular mechanisms of exosomal-ncRNA in regulating macrophage...

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are membrane-bound nanoparticles with different types of cargo released by cells and postulated to mediate functions such as intercellular communications. Recent studies have shown that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) or their fragments are present as cargo within EVs. LncRNAs are a heterogeneous group of RNA species wit...

Sarcoidosis is an inflammatory granulomatous disease of unknown etiology involving any organ or tissue along with any combination of active sites, even the most silent ones clinically. The unpredictable nature of the sites involved in sarcoidosis dictates the highly variable natural history of the disease and the necessity to cluster cases at diagn...

Exercise has well-recognized beneficial effects on the whole body. Previous studies suggest that exercise could promote tissue regeneration and repair in various organs. In this review, we have summarized the major effects of exercise on tissue regeneration primarily mediated by stem cells and progenitor cells in skeletal muscle, nervous system, an...

Significance: Heart failure is often accompanied by a decrease in the number of cardiomyocytes. Although the adult mammalian hearts have limited regenerative capacity, the rate of regeneration is extremely low and decreases with age. Exercise is an effective mean to improve cardiovascular function and prevent cardiovascular diseases. However, the...

Atherosclerosis, formed by fibrofatty lesions in the artery wall, underpins myocardial infarctions, strokes and disabling peripheral artery diseases. Inflammation with multiple maladaptive roles runs through atherosclerotic inception, propagation, and complications. Given degree of inflammation differing among atherosclerotics, inflammation-targete...

Background: Dysregulation of immune infiltration critically contributes to the tumorigenesis and progression of meningiomas. However, the landscape of immune microenvironment and key genes correlated with immune cell infiltration remains unclear. Methods: Four Gene Expression Omnibus datasets were included. CIBERSORT algorithm was utilized to an...

Myocardial ischemia/reperfusion injury (I/RI) may potentiate cardiac remodeling and heart failure, while effective therapies for I/RI remain lacking. Circulating extracellular vesicles (EV) have great potential to protect against I/RI. However, effective delivery of EV in vivo remains a limiting factor for clinical application. The present study co...

Skeletal muscle atrophy is a common clinical feature of many acute and chronic conditions. Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are covalently closed RNA transcripts that are involved in various physiological and pathological processes, but their role in muscle atrophy remains unknown. Global circRNA expression profiling indicated that circRNAs are involved in...

Commonly used prediction models have been primarily constructed without taking physical activity into account. Using the Kailuan physical activity cohorts from Asymptomatic Polyvascular Abnormalities in Community (APAC) study, we developed a 9‐year cardiovascular or cerebrovascular disease (CVD) risk prediction equation. Participants in this study...

Cardiac death is a major burden for cancer survivors, yet there is currently no effective treatment for doxorubicin (DOX)-induced cardiotoxicity. Here, we report that circ-ZNF609 knockdown knockdown had cardioprotective effects against DOX-induced cardiomyocyte toxicity. Mechanistically, circ-ZNF609 knockdown alleviated DOX-induced cardiotoxicity t...

The transplanting islets to the liver approach suffers from an immediate posttransplant loss of islets of more than 50%, progressive graft dysfunction over time, and precludes recovery of grafts should there be serious complications such as the development of teratomas with grafts that are stem cell-derived islets (SC-islets). The omentum features...

Background: Acute decompensation is associated with increased mortality in heart failure (HF) patients, though the underlying etiology remains unclear. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) and their cargo may mark specific cardiovascular physiologic states. We hypothesized that EV transcriptomic cargo, including long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and mRNAs, is...

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) carry diverse bioactive components including nucleic acids, proteins, lipids and metabolites that play versatile roles in intercellular and interorgan communication. The capability to modulate their stability, tissue-specific targeting and cargo render EVs as promising nanotherapeutics for treating heart, lung, blood an...

Background: Cardiorenal syndrome (CRS) renal injury during heart failure (HF) is linked to higher morbidity. Whether circulating extracellular vesicles (EVs) and their RNA cargo directly impact its pathogenesis remains unclear. Methods: Using a microfluidic kidney chip model (KC), we investigated transcriptional effects of circulating EVs from pati...

Muscle atrophy is debilitating and can be induced by several stressors. Unfortunately, there are no effective pharmacological treatment until now. MicroRNA (miR)-29b is an important target that we identified to be commonly involved in multiple types of muscle atrophy. Although sequence-specific inhibition of miR-29b has been developed, in this stud...

Neonatal mouse heart can regenerate after left ventricle (LV) apical resection (AR). Since current AR rodent method is accomplished by resecting LV apex until exposure of LV chamber, it is relatively difficult to operate reproducibly. We aimed to develop a modified AR method with high accuracy and reproducibility and to investigate whether cardiac...

Background Remote monitoring (RM) of cardiac implantable electronic devices has been shown to improve cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. To date, no studies have investigated disparities in use and delivery of RM. This study was performed to investigate if racial and socioeconomic disparities are present in cardiac implantable electronic devic...

It is well known that exercise is beneficial for cardiovascular health. Oxidative stress is the common pathological basis of many cardiovascular diseases. The overproduction of free radicals, both reactive oxygen species and reactive nitrogen species, can lead to redox imbalance and exacerbate oxidative damage to the cardiovascular system. Maintain...

Cardiovascular disease is one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide. Recent studies have shown that circular RNAs (circRNAs) have emerged as important players in the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular diseases. circRNAs are a class of endogenous noncoding RNAs that are generated by back-splicing and are involved in many pathophysiolo...

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) remain the world’s leading cause of death despite the best available healthcare and therapy. Emerging as a key mediator of intercellular and inter-organ communication in CVD pathogenesis, extracellular vesicles (EVs) are a heterogeneous group of membrane-enclosed nano-sized vesicles released by virtually all cells, of...

Muscle atrophy is a multifactor syndrome, which not only decreases the patients’ quality of life significantly but also increases the morbidity and mortality of patients with chronic diseases. At present, no effective clinical treatments for muscle atrophy except for exercise are available. The emerging field of genome editing is gaining momentum a...

RNA m ⁶ A modification is the most widely distributed RNA methylation and is closely related to various pathophysiological processes. Although the benefit of regular exercise on the heart has been well recognized, the role of RNA m ⁶ A in exercise training and exercise-induced physiological cardiac hypertrophy remains largely unknown. Here, we show...

Introduction: Remote monitoring (RM) of cardiac implantable electronic devices (CIEDs) has been shown to improve cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. To date, no studies have investigated disparities in utilization and delivery of RM. This study was performed to investigate if racial and socioeconomic disparities are present in CIED RM. Methods:...

Introduction: Despite anticoagulation (AC), up to 50% of proximal deep vein thrombosis (DVT) patients will develop the post-thrombotic syndrome (PTS). In a substudy of the ATTRACT DVT trial, catheter-directedthrombectomy/thrombolysis (CDT) in addition to AC improved PTS outcomes for patients presenting at an intermediate day (D) 4-8 symptom-onset-t...

Introduction: Acute decompensation is associated with increased long-term mortality in patients with heart failure (HF). Biomarkers of acute HF that are dynamic during decongestion may provide physiologic insight for this observation. We hypothesized that long-noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) and mRNAs in extracellular vesicles (EVs) not only mark differen...

Exercise has long been known for its active role in improving physical fitness and sustaining health. Regular moderate-intensity exercise improves all aspects of human health and is widely accepted as a preventative and therapeutic strategy for various diseases. It is well documented that exercise maintains and restores homeostasis at the organisma...

In the past few decades, obesity in the pediatric population has dramatically increased and is common in many countries. Childhood obesity often causes health problems and increases the risk of cardiometabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, nonalcohol fatty liver, and cardiovascular diseases. Obesity in young people has been closely associated w...

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide that bears an enormous healthcare burden and aging is a major contributing factor to CVDs. Functional gene expression network during aging is regulated by mRNAs transcriptionally and by non-coding RNAs epi-transcriptionally. RNA modifications alter the stability an...

Exercise training has been widely recognized as a healthy lifestyle as well as an effective non-drug therapeutic strategy for cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Functional and mechanistic studies that employ animal exercise models as well as observational and interventional cohort studies with human participants, have contributed considerably in deline...

Obesity is an important risk factor for atrial fibrillation (AF), but a better mechanistic understanding of obesity-related atrial fibrillation is required. Serum glucocorticoid kinase 1 (SGK1) is a kinase positioned within multiple obesity-related pathways, and prior work has shown a pathologic role of SGK1 signaling in ventricular arrhythmias. We...

Patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection (COVID-19) risk developing long-term neurologic symptoms after infection. Here, we identify biomarkers associated with neurologic sequelae one year after hospitalization for SARS-CoV-2 infection. SARS-CoV-2 positive patients were followed using post-SARS-CoV-2 online questionnaires and virtual visits. Hospitalized...

Autophagy—the lysosomal degradation of cytoplasmic components via their sequestration into double-membraned autophagosomes—has not been detected non-invasively. Here we show that the flux of autophagosomes can be measured via magnetic resonance imaging or serial near-infrared fluorescence imaging of intravenously injected iron oxide nanoparticles d...

In article 2200029, Junjie Xiao and co‐workers construct an artificial circular RNA named circmiR‐29b as a specific molecular sponge for miR‐29b. The artificial circmiR‐29b treat muscle atrophy by suppressing miR‐29b. As shown in the image, skeletal muscle is a super factory that produce protein and ATP. circmiR‐29b mediate as molecular sponge like...

Muscle atrophy is a frequently observed complication, characterized by the loss of muscle mass and strength, which diminishes the quality of life and survival. No effective therapy except exercise is currently available. In our previous study, repressing miR-29b has been shown to reduce muscle atrophy. In our current study, we have constructed arti...

Background Pathological cardiac hypertrophy occurs in response to numerous stimuli and precedes heart failure (HF). Therapies that ameliorate pathological cardiac hypertrophy are highly needed. Methods The expression level of miR-30d was analyzed in hypertrophy models and serum of patients with chronic heart failure by qRT-PCR. Gain and loss-of-fu...

Anthracyclines (ANTs) are a class of anticancer drugs widely used in oncology. However, the clinical application of ANTs is limited by their cardiotoxicity. The mechanisms underlying ANTs-induced cardiotoxicity (AIC) are complicated and involve oxidative stress, inflammation, topoisomerase 2β inhibition, pyroptosis, immunometabolism, autophagy, apo...

Increasing evidence shows that endothelial cells play critical roles in maintaining vascular homeostasis, regulating vascular tone, inhibiting inflammatory response, suppressing lipid leakage, and preventing thrombosis. The damage or injury of endothelial cells induced by physical, chemical, and biological risk factors is a leading contributor to t...

Extracellular tRNA‐Derived Small RNAs In article number 2200829, Saumya Das and co‐workers provide a comprehensive landscape for the signature of cellular and extracellular tRNA‐derived small RNAs (tDRs) in response to different stressors. They also determine a distinct fragmentation pattern for extracellular tDRs distinct from cellular tDRs and in...

With the aging of the global population, accumulating interest is focused on manipulating the fundamental aging‐related signaling pathways to delay the physiological aging process and eventually slow or prevent the appearance or severity of multiple aging‐related diseases. Recently, emerging evidence has shown that RNA modifications, which were his...

The Extracellular RNA communication consortium (ERCC) is an NIH-funded program aiming to promote the development of new technologies, resources, and knowledge about exRNAs and their carriers. After Phase I (2013-2018), Phase 2 of the program (ERCC2, 2019-2023) aims to fill critical gaps in knowledge and technology to enable rigorous and reproducibl...

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are covalently closed RNA produced by back-splicing. Circ RNAs have been considered as a type of non-coding RNAs for a long time. However, recent studies have shown that circRNAs can be translated into functional proteins. Proteins specifically encoded by circRNAs have been proved to play important roles in cancer pathology...

Air pollution, via ambient PM2.5, is a big threat to public health since it associates with increased hospitalisation, incidence rate and mortality of cardiopulmonary injury. However, the potential mediators of pulmonary injury in PM2.5‐induced cardiovascular disorder are not fully understood. To investigate a potential cross talk between lung and...

Recent evidences have shown that exercise training not only plays a necessary role in maintaining cardiac homeostasis, but also promotes cardiac repair after myocardial infarction. Post-myocardial infarction, exercise training has been observed to effectively increase the maximum cardiac output, and protect myocardial cells against necrosis and apo...

The cellular response to stress is an important determinant of disease pathogenesis. Uncovering the molecular fingerprints of distinct stress responses may identify novel biomarkers and key signaling pathways for different diseases. Emerging evidence shows that transfer RNA‐derived small RNAs (tDRs) play pivotal roles in stress responses. However,...

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) and their cargo act as signaling moieties by transferring their cargo to recipient cells, thereby mediating intercellular communication in complex tissue environments such as the tumor microenvironment. In the accompanying paper, Kudo et al. describe the interaction between tumor EVs and soluble phospholipase released b...

Muscle atrophy is commonly caused by various diseases but still lacks effective treatment in clinical practice. Here, we constructed an artificial circular RNA (circRNA) named circmiR‐29b, which was designed to be a molecular sponge for miR‐29b containing 12 imperfect bulged miR‐29b binding sites. CircmiR‐29b showed a favorable functional effect wi...

Background: The heart grows in response to pathological and physiological stimuli. The former often precedes cardiomyocyte loss and heart failure; the latter paradoxically protects the heart and enhances cardiomyogenesis. The mechanisms underlying these differences remain incompletely understood. While long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are important i...

Human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC) technology has offered nearly infinite opportunities to model all kinds of human diseases in vitro. Cardiomyocytes derived from hPSCs have proved to be efficient tools for cardiac disease modeling, drug screening and pathological mechanism studies. In this review, we discuss the advantages and limitations of 2D hP...

Dynamic profiling of changes in gene expression in response to stressors in specific microenvironments without requiring cellular destruction remains challenging. Current methodologies that seek to interrogate gene expression at a molecular level require sampling of cellular transcriptome and therefore lysis of the cell, preventing serial analysis...

The transition of embryonic stem cells from the epiblast stem cells (EpiSCs) to neural progenitor cells (NPCs), name as the neural induction process, is crucial for cell fate determination of neural differentiation. However, the mechanism of this transition is unclear. Here, we identified a long non-coding RNA (linc1548) as a critical regulator of...

Published in iScience: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.104833 // Background: Patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection (COVID-19) risk developing long-term neurologic symptoms after infection, though risk factors and mechanisms for this phenomenon remain largely unknown. This study seeks to identify biomarkers associated with neurologic sequelae in p...

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) mediate intercellular signaling by transferring their cargo to recipient cells, but the functional consequences of signaling are not fully appreciated. RBC-derived EVs are abundant in circulation and have been implicated in regulating immune responses. Here, we use a transgenic mouse model for fluorescence-based mapping...

The cellular response to stress is an important determinant of disease pathogenesis. Uncovering the molecular fingerprints of distinct stress responses may yield novel biomarkers for different diseases, and potentially identify key signaling pathways important for disease progression. tRNAs and tRNA-derived small RNAs (tDRs) comprise one of the mos...

Heart failure (HF) remains the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the US, affecting approximately 6.2 million Americans with an anticipated 46% increase in overall prevalence by 2030. Myocardial fibrosis, defined as increased cardiac fibroblast (CF) activation and excessive extracellular matrix (ECM) deposition, is a leading contributor to...

Chemotherapy is widely used in the treatment of cancer patients, but the cardiotoxicity induced by chemotherapy is still a major concern to most clinicians. Currently, genetic methods have been used to detect patients with high risk of chemotherapy-induced cardiotoxicity (CIC), and our study evaluated the correlation between genomic variants and CI...

Rationale Given its rising prevalence in both the adult and pediatric populations, obesity has become an increasingly important risk factor in the development of atrial fibrillation. However, a better mechanistic understanding of obesity-related atrial fibrillation is required. Serum glucocorticoid kinase 1 (SGK1) is a kinase positioned downstream...