Studying t-tubule structure and function in normal and damaged heart muscle

Cardiac T-tubular ultrastructural remodelling in health and disease

The main pumping chambers of the heart, the ventricles, are made up of billions of muscle cells. For our hearts to pump, electrical signals must spread rapidly from the pacemaker within the heart to ‘activate’ the cells in the ventricles to pump. We know this process becomes disrupted in heart disease – and understanding this process better may reveal ways to prevent this happening. Each cell contains an intricate network of 'transverse tubules', or T-tub, that act like an electrical wiring system to coordinate this cell activation. Scientists have found that T-tub are fluid-filled conductors, like a plumbing system made of rubber tubing. T-tub get squeezed on every heartbeat, but so far we do not know if, or how much, this affects their electrical function. Dr Eva Rog Zielinska has worked in Professor Peter Kohl’s research group at the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London since 2013. She has now received a prestigious BHF Immediate Postdoctoral Basic Science Research Fellowship to begin developing her own independent heart research career. In her fellowship, Eva will study T-tub in cells at rest and during activation, in both health and disease. She will reconstruct them in three dimensions using state-of-the-art imaging techniques, and study them in minute detail at nano-metre resolution, to find out how they work and how they are different when the heart muscle becomes damaged after a heart attack. This research will unravel more about how heart muscle cells change in healthy and diseased tissue, and may reveal new ways to treat heart disease.