The discovery of Faint “Quark” Working with Heart Goes Viral physiologists

Wednesday, 25 January 2012, 21:11 | Category : Safety

Perhaps it is not yet ready for prime time news, but the publication of the discovery had a profound impact in the field of cardiac physiology, with more than 1,400 downloads of the journal Circulation Research in just one month, one of the highest ever according to the director Jonathan Schultz. The paper is the cover story and is accompanied by an editorial support.They found smaller calcium release events, which are about one-tenth the size of Ca2 + sparks. They studied the CFR events and Ca2 + on and their interaction. Surprisingly they found that the events were more frequent Quarky calcium sparks common heartbeat, with the contribution of QRCS total calcium release during the period between jokes about the same sparks in force. This is important for more than one comparative study of cardiac tissue healthy and unhealthy.

The event was the new version called Quarky because it measures the opening of a few individuals or SR calcium release channels. Scientists have called for the release of a normal channel of a kick quarks but so far nobody has been able to see anything close to the supposed event.

The experiments were performed in heart cells from healthy animals. Currently, the team is running the same experiments in animal models of human disease. This will give us the order we need to assess the extent to which QRCS affect the health of the cells. This information will help researchers develop new drugs to calm Quarky release, Pike said.

In an accompanying editorial, How to detect Ca2 + quarks in the same issue of the newspaper, Niall and Karin R. Sipido MacQuaid University of Leuven, Belgium explain how the paper’s authors to speculate on the possible underlying mechanism releases calcium thin, and the implications of the discovery of medicine.

Pike says ongoing research and the therapeutic goal is the identification and characterization of a drug that can stop the release of calcium Quarky. He noted that this drug will offer a new way to treat heart disease, including the contraction and poor and can lead to a healthy heart.

These events are obviously a small role in shaping how the calcium is released from cardiac cells. They contribute to the release of calcium invisible in sickness and in health, said Pike

Because cardiovascular disease, including cardiac arrhythmia and sudden cardiac death and stroke is the leading cause of death worldwide, while a significant new insight into the physiology of the heart is huge, said co-author Jonathan W. Lederer, MD, Ph.D. Director of Biomet.

The new research is based on the heart before the so-called Ca2 + sparks, blocks of calcium that are naturally released from an internal cellular compartment called the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR).

Now we have found that the Ca2 + spark is not the only form of SR calcium release, said lead author Didier Brochet, PhD, research associate at the University of Maryland Center for Biomedical Engineering and Technology (Biomet) . We thought about it before, there was only one kind of SR calcium release. Now there is another way of SR calcium release, called Ca 2 + release Quarky (CFR) due to its very small size. The occurrence of the CFR is almost invisible and can reduce the amount of calcium in the SR Ca 2 + from the heart beats between the cellar ways that may affect the ability of the heart to beat correctly .

These events Quarky release of calcium are very abundant in health and certainly in the disease. The idea is to assess how important they are for the development of arrhythmias. Pike said.

In cardiac muscle, calcium sparks have a fundamental role in linking the electrical activity of contraction of the heart or heart rate.

If we were able to specifically inhibit these events Quarky, then we may be able to treat arrhythmias and heart failure without altering the contractile function of the heart. In short, you would get a better heart. This is what we all hope!