The goal of the NextGen Cardiovascular, Muscle & Metabolism Science Seminar is to highlight transdisciplinary precision research taking place in cardiovascular, muscle and metabolism fields; provide opportunities for collaboration among researchers to build their own research efforts; and promote clinical/researcher activity across the University of Missouri System and our partners.

For questions about this event, please reach out to Veronica Lemme lemmev@health.missouri.edu.

"Myofilament Power in Failing Hearts"

Presented by: Dr. Kerry McDonald, Chair of Medical Pharmacology and Physiology

Bolm Distinguished Professor

George L. and Melna A. Bolm Distinguished Chair in Cardiovascular Health

University of Missouri-School of Medicine

Date: Monday, Jan. 9, 2023, noon-1 p.m.

Description

This seminar focused on myofilament contractile properties, their changes with heart failure and molecular targets for therapeutic intervention. Dr. McDonald’s research focuses on understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in the regulation of skeletal and cardiac muscle contraction and ways that these processes may be altered by disease and other physiological stresses such as ischemia and exercise training. A major emphasis of his laboratory is to define the factors that regulate the capacity of single cardiac myocytes to perform work, a physiological variable that is essential for the heart to move blood throughout the circulatory system and adjust ventricular output to the body’s demands on a beat-to-beat basis. To address these questions, Dr. McDonald has taken multi-faceted approaches incorporating in vivo, isolated organ, tissue, cellular and molecular preparations. For many of his experimental measurements, he is one of the few investigators in the country to utilize preparations of single cardiac myocytes or skeletal muscle fibers from which the sarcolemma has been chemically removed. While these preparations are difficult to use, they present important advantages in designing experimental protocols to interrogate mechanistic underpinnings of muscle contraction in health and disease.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Kerry McDonald is professor and chair of the Department of Medical Pharmacology and Physiology at the University of Missouri School of Medicine. He earned his bachelor’s in biology from Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, in 1987 and his PhD in muscle biology from Marquette University in Milwaukee in 1992. Dr. McDonald received postdoctoral training in muscle physiology and biophysics in the Department of Physiology at the University of Wisconsin working with Richard L. Moss, PhD. Dr. McDonald joined the faculty in the Department of Physiology at the University of Missouri in 1997, where he advanced in rank to his current position of professor and chair. His laboratory studies the regulation of striated muscle contraction in health and disease. Dr. McDonald has developed a unique technique that utilizes single cardiac myocytes to assess mechanisms that regulate contractile properties. His lab has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 1996. Dr. McDonald has over 60 publications investigating myofilament regulation of contraction and has served on multiple grant review groups for NIH, American Heart Association, the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom and the Marsden Fund in New Zealand.