heart failure
dr. dolittle | June 24, 2017 Photo of zebrafish housed at a research institute. By Karol Głąb CC BY-SA 3.0. via Wikimedia Commons
Who would have thought tiny fish could lead to big advances in medicine? Zebrafish (Danio rerio) and mammals have similar anatomy and physiology of the brain, eyes, gut, and cardiovascular systems. Some of the reasons why these fish are good models to understand cardiovascular physiology were recently explored in a new article published in Physiological Reviews.
Animal models are used in research that seeks to understand both normal physiological mechanisms as well as mechanisms related to…
dr. dolittle | October 20, 2015 Image of Drosophila from Wikipedia.
A new study published in the American Journal of Physiology - Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology describes how Drosophila melanogaster develop similar heart complications as humans when they become obese. Rather than feeding them a high fat diet to induce obesity, researchers selected flies that were resistant to starvation over 65 generations. The so-called starvation resistant Drosophila had dilated hearts that had an impaired ability to contract. Interestingly, the problem was caused by fat deposits literally shifting the position of…
dr. dolittle | May 1, 2014Day 4 of the meeting turned out to be pretty exciting for a comparative physiologist as well.
The first session that I went to was called "RNASEQ approaches to understanding extreme physiological adaptations." Considering the Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology section business and dinner meeting was the night before, I was impressed at my ability to make it to an 8:00am session the following morning.
The first seminar from Dr. Brooke C Harrison (Univ. Colorado, Boulder) was on "Extreme cardiac growth and metabolism in the Burmese python after feeding." He spoke about how the cells of…