Writing this piece gave us the opportunity to reflect on the heterogeneous manifestations of CKD, a disease with many different legs, and how CNNs may open several opportunities to fill existing knowledge gaps. Time ahead will be exciting.

Our piece is available here: Genomics of kidney volumes: one size does not fit all, Kidney Int 2026

My communication was an elaboration of the concept of triangulation in casual inference applied to molecular biology, using our desmoplakin experiment as a working example (see previous post).

From our group, Roberto Melotti described how fine motor performance changes with age and Giulia Barbieri discussed how menopause may modify the relation between dietary patterns, metabolomic profiles and metabolic health.

Congress proceedings can be found here.

After a long journey, we could finally publish this fantastic work.

The reseach, led by outstanding Luisa Foco, started from the interest of our colleagues Alessandra Rossini and Marzia De Bortoli into the molecular mechanisms of arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy. We observed that most disease-causing mutations occur in desmosomal genes. Given rare inherited and common chronic conditions are at different ends of a common genetic background, we conducted genomic association studies between common variants at the 5 desmosomal genes and ECG traits assessed in general population individuals. Our key finding was a variant located in the DSP gene associated with the QRS interval.

Functional annotation revealed that the variant is located in a short segment where the DSP gene overlaps one of its antisense microRNA, the DSP-AS1. Interestingly, the identified variant was associated with DSP-AS1 but not DSP expression. Two-sample Mendelian randomization revealed a causal effect of the antisense RNA DSP-AS1 on both DSP and QRS interval. The causal effect of DSP-AS1 on DSP was confirmed by in vitro experiments on human induced pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes. Altogether, these findings support DSP-AS1 as a potential target for DSP-related diseases.