Illustration: Stephanie King
In a new paper in the journal Function, Rachel Lopez, a Molecular & Integrative Physiology graduate student working in the lab of Dan Beard, Ph.D., the Carl J. Wiggers Collegiate Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology, and their colleagues showed how the metabolic dysfunction that occurs in heart failure leads specifically to a build-up of phosphate in the muscle cells of the heart, and how this increased phosphate can impede the molecular process that underlies muscle contraction, known as the actin-myosin cross-bridge cycle.
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