Conveners
Human physiology
- Gen Kurosawa ()
Adipose tissue and adipocytes play a central role in the pathogenesis of metabolic diseases related to obesity. Size of fat cells depends on the balance of synthesis and mobilization of lipids and can undergo important variations throughout the life of the organism. These variations usually occur when storing and releasing lipids according to energy demand. This energy is stored as lipid...
In this presentation we consider a recent experimental dataset describing heat conduction in living porcine tissues. This novel dataset is important because porcine skin is similar to human skin, and improving our understanding of heat conduction in human skin is directly relevant to understanding burn injuries, which are common, painful and can require expensive treatments. A key feature of...
Circadian analysis is becoming increasingly important as a diagnostic tool to quantify deviations from regularity in circadian cycles. Circadian rhythms become less dominant and less regular with ageing and disease. It has been hypothesized that insomnia might be related to alterations, albeit small, in circadian and ultradian rhythms, but this topic remains an open problem. In this work, we...
In Drosophila, circadian (~24h) behaviour is regulated by about 150 pacemaker neurons. To generate and maintain 24h rhythm, circadian gene expression in each pacemaker neurons is driven by transcriptional-translational feedback loop (TTFL). In TTFL of Drosophila, dCLOCK-CYCLE (dCLK-CYC) binds to the E-box (CACGTG) and activates the expression of period (per) and timeless (tim). Translated PER...
Variability in electrophysiological properties, between different cells in a given heart and between the hearts of different members in a population, has a profound impact on deciding both the susceptibility to dangerous arrhythmias and the success or failure of anti-arrhythmic treatments. This variability also complicates the interpretation of both experimental and clinical data, and the...
Asthma is fundamentally a disease of airway constriction. Due to a variety of experimental challenges, the dynamics of airways are poorly understood. Of specific interest is the narrowing of the airway due to forces produced by the airway smooth muscle (ASM) wrapped around each airway. The interaction between the muscle and the airway wall is crucial for the airway constriction which occurs...
