Tracing the genetic causes of cardiovascular diseases

Cardiovascular diseases are the most common cause of illness and death in western industrialized countries. Genetic factors play a key role in the development of these diseases. The aim of our work is to gain new insights into the development of diseases and to develop new diagnostic procedures. Our focus is on heart muscle diseases - cardiomyopathies.

We use a broad range of methods to research cardiac muscle diseases, including the analysis of the basic mechanisms of cardiac contractility in the zebrafish and mouse heart, the decoding of entire genomes and epigenomes using the latest sequencing technologies and the application of artificial intelligence.

Our projects are intended to contribute to the heart health of the population and are part of the "German Center for Cardiovascular Research" (DZHK) and are supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the European Union (ERA-CVD), the Klaus Tschira Foundation (Informatics for Life), Leducq Foundation, CRC 1550 (Molecular Curcuits of Heart Disease) and the Else Kröner Fresenius Foundation.

Our team is located in the new building of the Klaus Tschira Institute for Integrative Computational Cardiology. This modern laboratory building offers a fully automated biobank, robotic systems, our next-generation sequencing unit with the latest instruments such as NovaSeq 6000 (Illumina), Miniseq (Illumina), GridIon (Oxford Nanopore), MinIon (Oxford Nanopore) and its own data center as central infrastructure.