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

  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 acts on muscle molecular motors (ii) applying it in a q

Probably, the best way to start this blog is... from the beginning. I arrived in Japan in September 2021 as the outgoing period of a Global Fellowship project which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 886232 and here I will shortly describe the project aims. First, the Global Fellowship are grants "open to European nationals or long-term residents who wish to engage in R&I projects with organisations outside EU Member States" These fellowships require an outgoing phase of minimum 12 and maximum 24 months , as in my case, in a non-associated Third Country. For the reason outlined below, I chose JAPAN 🇯🇵 as hosting country . After the outgoing period there is a mandatory 12-month return phase to a host organisation based in an EU Member State which in my case is ITALY 🇮🇹. The hosting organizations are RIKEN in Japan, and Padova University in Italy. My p