Scientists catch heartbeat ’molecular switch’ in action

Oxford University Radcliffe Department of Medicine researchers have developed a new method that uses a protein originally found in marine corals to visualise the flow of calcium that makes the heart beat. In a paper published in the journal Circulation Research , they used this technique to uncover the effects of genetic errors that contribute to a heart condition that is the leading killer of healthy people between the ages of 20 and 40 in the UK. During its lifetime, the heart contracts millions of times to pump blood around the body. Charged particles of calcium control how hard and how often the heart contracts. But there was no direct way of tracking the ebb and flow of calcium to the fibres that respond to calcium in order to make the heart beat. So Dr Matthew Daniels and his colleagues developed a new method to track calcium in the heart, without altering the overall activity of the heart cell. The team's colleagues in Alberta, Canada and Osaka, Japan had previously extracted a protein from the Discosoma marine coral, and tuned it to glow red in the presence of calcium.