Lab News

Congratulations to all of the authors.  The publication can be found here.

Dr. Garg, a postdoc in the lab started a new position at Johns Hopkins and received a great score on his K08 grant from NHLBI!

Our latest publication is “Multiscale biophysical models of cardiomyopathies reveal complexities challenging existing dogmas”. Here, we describe how experimental and computational biophysical tools are being harnessed to study cardiomyopathies and how they are revealing new insights into the disease pathogenesis that challenge existing models.  The article can be found here.

New article with Dr. Ankit Garg, “Assessing Cardiac Contractility From Single Molecules to Whole Hearts”.  We describe how multiscale tools can be harnessed to reveal new insights into heart failure.  The article can be found here.

Dr. Ankit Garg won the Sobel Award for Basic and Translational Research.

This work, lead by first authors Sarah Clippinger-Schulte and Brent Scott, shows that regulatory proteins in cardiac muscle act via a steric blocking mechanism at physiological ATP concentrations. These proteins do not affect myosin’s mechanics or load dependence.

Interestingly, we see that regulatory proteins tune the kinetics of cardiac myosin’s interactions with the thin filament at low, non-physiological ATP concentrations, suggesting biophysical mechanisms that cannot be explained using conventional models.

The behavior of cardiac myosin interacting with regulated thin filaments is different from other regulated actomyosin systems where these proteins can tune myosin’s mechanics and kinetics, highlighting the diverse roles of regulatory proteins in the cell.

The paper can be found here.

Brent Scott was appointed to the Pediatric Cardiopulmonary T32.