A toolkit to identify proteins that keep heart cells healthy

The role of nuclear envelope proteins in cardiac conduction and heart disease

Professor Glenn Morris and his colleagues at Keele University are working out which proteins help heart cells to remain healthy, keep beating constantly for many years, and what goes wrong in heart disease. Sometimes people are born with faults that make their heart cells more susceptible to damage or that affect the heart’s pacemaker. Identifying the faulty proteins and what they do could reveal a new way to develop an artificial pacemaker and to prevent damage to the heart caused by continuous beating. In this project, Professor Morris will work with experts from universities in London and Edinburgh to develop tools to identify proteins found in the nucleus of heart cells. He will produce antibodies to identify specific proteins that have been linked with heart disease. Antibodies are large proteins that are part of our immune system that recognise unique target proteins, in this case the proteins that have been linked with heart disease. After making sure that they work properly, this toolkit will be made freely-available to other scientists so that they can use them in their research. The tools developed in this research will allow scientists to detect changes within the cells in heart disease and could one day reveal new ways to diagnose, treat or predict the outcomes for people with cardiovascular disease.