Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is characterized primarily by left ventricular dilatation and impaired systolic function and is one of the leading causes of heart failure with high morbidity and ...

Muscle malfunctions may be as simple as a slight strain after exercise or as serious as heart failure and muscular dystrophy. A new technique now makes it possible to look much more closely at how ...

Setting out to identify all proteins that make up the sarcomere, the basic contractile unit of muscle cells, resulted in an unexpected revelation, providing experimental evidence that helps explain a ...

Scientists have produced the first high-resolution 3D image of the sarcomere, the basic contractile unit of skeletal and heart muscle cells, using electron cryo-tomography (cryo-ET). The international ...

Atrial fibrillation, heart failure and stroke – hypertrophic cardiomyopathy can lead to many serious health conditions and is a major cause of sudden cardiac death in people younger than 35. „The ...

In a heartbeat, cardiac muscle cells contract to push blood out to the body, then relax to allow the heart to fill again. This is possible because muscle proteins are organized into sarcomeres, which ...

Myocardial fibrosis is a hallmark of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and a proposed substrate for arrhythmias and heart failure. In animal models, profibrotic genetic pathways are activated early, before ...

Row 1 shows a schematic representation of the sarcomere. Row 2 shows the three-dimensional sarcomere organization and plasticity at the molecular level (filaments: pink and green, ?-Actinin: blue).

The childhood onset of idiopathic cardiac hypertrophy that occurs without a family history of cardiomyopathy can portend a poor prognosis. Despite morphologic similarities to genetic cardiomyopathies ...