Gordon Research Conference: Day 3

I don’t have notes for whether I ran on the third day of the conference or not. If memory serves me correctly, I did, and it was the last one. The morning sessions started off with a talk on calmodulin as a sensor for calcium regulation. I don’t have record handy of who the first speaker was. I got better at taking notes as the conference went on.

Next was a talk by Dr.Pogwizd, of whose papers I have read a couple. He talked about sodium/calcium exchange with regard to contractile dysfunction and arrhythmogenesis.

Then, Guy Salama talked about intracellular calcium as a trigger of arrhythmias, particularly with regard to LQT-3.

I don’t want to disclose details of the talks due to the nature of the conference and so on… I have a note here that I should compare Vm and Cai in regional ischemia when I see alternans. I was very interested in his talk, but at some point realized that it didn’t directly apply to my current work, as the experiments he covered involved global ischemia. This of course especially interested Blanca.

I spoke with Dr.Pogwizd at lunch following the morning session and he noted that I should check papers by M.R. Rosen for info on the QT interval for male vs. female animals. Apparently it’s often sexually dimorphic.

I don’t have any notes on what we did in the afternoon break. I think we may have gone to Kalyra that day. This is what I get for doing this post so late. The evening session was started off by Mario Delmar, who elaborated on regulation of connexin function by binding partner. I didn’t realize quite how complex the behavior of connexin was until this talk, not having had to investigate it in detail previously. He showed a really gorgeous image of a computer model of the connexin protein, found in Science (PubMed abstract/access) done by Unger VM, Kumar NM, Gilula NB, and Yeager M.

Next Andre Kl?bert covered the role of connexin proteins in cardiac impulse propagation, covering the different types of connexin and pointing out distinguishing characteristics thereof.

Finally for that session (at least as far as I took notes 0f) was Stephen Rohr, who covered the coupling of cardiac myocytes by firbroblasts of cardiac origin.He cited Camelliti 2004 (in both Circ Res and Cardiovasc Res) as well as Goldsmith et al 2004 in a dynamics journal… but I can’t read my writing very well. This talk generated several pages of discussion. Five pages, actually.

I’ll have to do the next GRC entry tomorrow, I’m tiring of this.