Molecular Variants of Soluble Guanylyl Cyclase Affecting Cardiovascular Risk

Summary In this review we highlighted the fundamentals of sGC from it numerous forms of appearance at the mRNA level through its diversity in expression to the functional aspects. In the vas-culature, the most important source of NO is eNOS. NO again is the main stimulus for sGC to transform GTP into the ubiq-uitous second messenger cGMP, which regulates many down-stream proteins !nally in"uencing vessel tonus and platelet aggregation, for example. Decreased cGMP production plays a decisive role in the pathogenesis of several disorders, includ -ing cardiovascular diseases. In their recent study, Martin et al were the !rst to nail down the relationship between splice vari-ants of GUCY1A3 and GUCY1B3 and a phenotype in human aortas. Moreover, a recent genetic study revealed that alterna-tive splice variants might henceforth play an important role as targets in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. Acknowledgments The study was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the context of the e:Med program (e:AtheroSysMed) and the FP7 European Union project CVgenes@target (261123). Further grants were received by the Fondation Leducq (CADgenomics: Under-