Spider proteins offer new insight into human heart conditions
Proteins found in the muscles of tarantulas are helping scientists to understand how genetic changes can lead to serious heart conditions.
Jun 14, 2017
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Proteins found in the muscles of tarantulas are helping scientists to understand how genetic changes can lead to serious heart conditions.
Jun 14, 2017
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One University of Kentucky (UK) researcher has helped solve a 60-year-old mystery about one of the body's most vital organs: The heart.
Nov 14, 2023
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(PhysOrg.com) -- In a famous experiment first performed more than 220 years ago, Italian physician Luigi Galvani discovered that the muscles of a frog's leg twitch when an electric voltage is applied. An international group ...
Apr 11, 2011
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New insight into the physiology of cardiac muscle may lead to the development of therapeutic strategies that exploit an inherent protective state of the heart. The research, published by Cell Press online on April 19th in ...
Apr 19, 2011
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Chronic muscle spasticity after nervous system defects like stroke, traumatic brain and spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis and painful low back pain affect more than 10% of the population, with a socioeconomic cost of ...
Oct 16, 2020
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A study led by Stanford Medicine researchers shows why so many mutations associated with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a heart disorder, alter a key constituent of muscle cells in a way that makes it work overtime.
Aug 20, 2018
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Red blood cells are on a wild ride. As they race through the body to deliver oxygen, they must maintain a distinct dimpled shape—and bounce back into form even after squishing through narrow capillaries. Red blood cells ...
Apr 4, 2018
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Artificial muscles and self-propelled goo may be the stuff of Hollywood fiction, but for UC Santa Barbara scientists Omar Saleh and Deborah Fygenson, the reality of it is not that far away. By blending their areas of expertise, ...
Oct 23, 2012
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The human heart is a fine-tuned engine - more advanced than the finest Ferrari despite being simply designed by Mother Nature. It's so carefully constructed that if it gets off kilter in the slightest way, it can throw the ...
Feb 20, 2015
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On Dec. 14, 2014, after many months of not getting expected results, biochemist Jim Spudich got into bed, read a chunk of a novel, fell asleep and had a dream that would change the focus of his entire field in thinking about ...
Mar 21, 2019
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Myosins comprise a family of ATP-dependent motor proteins and are best known for their role in muscle contraction and their involvement in a wide range of other eukaryotic motility processes. They are responsible for actin-based motility. The term was originally used to describe a group of similar ATPases found in striated and smooth muscle cells. Following the discovery by Pollard and Korn of enzymes with myosin-like function in Acanthamoeba castellanii, a large number of divergent myosin genes have been discovered throughout eukaryotes. Thus, although myosin was originally thought to be restricted to muscle cells (hence, "myo"), there is no single "myosin" but rather a huge superfamily of genes whose protein products share the basic properties of actin binding, ATP hydrolysis (ATPase enzyme activity), and force transduction. Virtually all eukaryotic cells contain myosin isoforms. Some isoforms have specialized functions in certain cell types (such as muscle), while other isoforms are ubiquitous. The structure and function of myosin is strongly conserved across species, to the extent that rabbit muscle myosin II will bind to actin from an amoeba.
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