Recently, Professor Wang Kun’s research group made important progress in their research on the mechanism of long-chain noncoding RNA regulating myocardial infarction. Their research results were reported in “LncRNA CAIF inhibits autophagy and attenuates myocardial infarction by blocking p53-mediated myocardin transcription,” which was published in Nature Communications (Impact factor: 12.12). This is the sixth article with an impact factor of more than 10 published by the Institute of Translational Medicine at Qingdao University since its establishment. The first author of the study was Liu Cuiyun, and the corresponding author was Wang Kun. The project was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Taishan scholar Program in Shandong Province.

Long-chain noncoding RNA (lncRNA) is an RNA molecule with a transcript length of more than 200 NT. It exists in a large number of cells, and it participates widely in cell life activities. It plays an important role in the occurrence and development of a variety of diseases. Autophagy is an important means of cell death, and it plays an important role in myocardial infarction. At present, the mechanism of lncRNA regulating cardiomyocyte autophagy is not clear. In this work, Professor Wang Kun found a new long-chain noncoding RNA, lncRNA CAIF, which inhibited cardiomyocyte autophagy and protected the heart in a mouse myocardial infarction model. The study on its regulation mechanism found that lncRNA CAIF could directly bind to p53 protein, block p53 mediated myocardin transcription, lead to the downregulation of myocardin expression level, and then inhibit cardiomyocyte autophagy. This study revealed the important role of the regulatory axis composed of CAIF-p53-myocardin in cardiomyocyte autophagy, thus providing a potential therapeutic target for autophagy-related cardiovascular diseases.