Zinc unmasks a new player in ischaemic heart failure (Ms Amy Dorward)
Dr Samantha Pitt from the University of St Andrew’s is studying how calcium is released from heart cells to maintain a regular heartbeat, and what goes wrong in heart failure. In healthy people, controlled calcium release causes the heart to beat strongly. In people with heart failure, calcium release becomes erratic, causing weaker heart contraction and heart cells to die. Zinc levels are low in healthy hearts, but when the heart is injured these levels rise. Dr Pitt has discovered that zinc fine-tunes calcium release from stores in heart cells. She believes that as well as a protein channel called the ryanodine receptor, a protein called mitsugumin23 (MG23) may also be involved in calcium release within the heart, and that zinc controls MG23 activity, causing erratic calcium release. She has found that MG23 rises when heart cells are dying. In this project, Dr Pitt’s PhD student will study sheep and rat tissue to unravel the molecular intricacies underpinning how zinc regulates MG23 when the heart’s blood supply becomes restricted. The student will work out how this leads to erratic calcium release and alters muscle contraction, and will define MG23’s role in heart cell death. This research will reveal more about zinc’s role in the heart and how it affects calcium release, and may identify new ways to treat heart failure.
Project details
| Grant amount | £122,249 |
|---|---|
| Grant type | Fellowships |
| Application type | PhD Studentship |
| Start Date | 01 September 2017 |
| Duration | 3 years, 3 months |
| Reference | FS/17/9/32676 |
| Status | In Progress |
