A Super Relaxed Journey in Japan – news from my MSCA GF project between EU and Japan

Ready to start! For two days the university of Padova will share the science with the non university public in Padova. I contributed to a very nice event organized by the Department of Biomedical Sciences, to extract the DNA from a... banana! I saw many young reserachers (7-12 years old) interested and excited to destroy the banana cells and to so a loooong DNA emerging into the solution.   It is a very easy experience that everyone can do at home with common items, just dish soap, salt, water and "pink" alchool. But if you want to know the procedure you had better to come to the event and listen the nice explanation of Giorgia! Every young scientist had the possibility to bring the DNA home. 

Old posts will be published again soon. New posts will be sometime published in the meantime. Sorry for the technical problems.

One thing I like of Japan is it's natural landscapes. And coming from a superflat region in Italy, where the highest point doesn't overcome (maybe) 10 meters above sea level and the lowest is few meters below, I really like mountains and hiking.   Before leaving Japan, I decided that I MUST climb Fuji san! It's the highest mountain in Japan and it's also a volcano. And a sacred mountain as well (the name derive from Fuchi, the Ainu's god of fire), but I am more on the hiking side! Here I am on the shinkansen to Shizuoka.  It takes just a couple of hours from my house to this bullet train running at 280 km/hour now. Then a slower train will bring me in 90 minutes at about 35 km from the top. Then I hope to walk for about 15 hours to reach the top in time for the sunset! 

How important is the calcium diffusion in the sequential activation of the thick filament? I discussed about this topic in a previous post . With my collaborators at the Department of Biomedical Science s in Padova University, we are exploring this issue through a mathematical model based on experimental data on calcium signalling in the three main compartments of the muscle cells: sarcoplasmic reticulum, cytosol and mitoshondria. In fact, while usually neglected, we think that mithocondria may play an important role in the calcium distribution during activation, at least in skeletal muscle cells. Our work lead to an extensive review done with the priceless enormous contribution of Prof. Carlo Reggiani, just published in the Journal of General Physiology.  You can read it here , but our main conclusion is that the mitochondria may have an important role, and that this must be elucidated with further analyses.  From the point of view of the super relaxed state, and its activati...

 The first part of my project aims at collecting as much as possible (AKA "all") the current knowledge of the mechanosensing mechanism, or WHY and HOW the super-relaxed myosin heads decide to rise up and start the actomyosin cycle to produce force. Here, I report a striking result from Brunello and Fusi, at King's College of London, published in PNAS in march 2020.  The applied the X-ray diffraction technique to study the thick filament structure in cardiac muscle. Small angle XRay diffraction is one of the most used techniques to dynamically analyze the state of the thick filament, thanks to the different spacing that the myosin motors have in each state. The interpretation of the data is made through mathematical models of predicted X-ray diffractions from different populations. Despite it is necessarily based on some assumptions, its interpretation can be considered well established in the literature. I do not report here the beautiful pictures reported in the paper b...

  Let me introduce shortly the project.   The main reason why I am living in Japan now.   The super short story, is that a new state has been “recently” discovered in the striated muscle. A state which is stable in the   relaxed muscles , which was   hiding itself   because for many decades researchers were interested in the  active behavior of muscles . It’s obvious isn’t it? You want to know how muscle contract, not how the can stay relaxed!! Well, the current view is that this new state, called  SUPER-RELAXED STATE , can deeply influence the  active behavior  of muscles, especially of cardiac muscle, causing also serious diseases when it’s  equilibrium is perturbed . So, in this sense the super-relaxed state is pretty “active” or “genki” (げんき, or 元気) in Japanese. A 元気 super-relaxed state ! So! My Global Fellowship project aims at: (i) defining the theoretical bases of the recently discovered “mechanosensing” (MS) mechanism that a...