Rupamanjari Majumder - University of Göttingen, Allemagne

Independent research scientist
Université de Göttingen, Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self Organisation

Abstract

Understanding how the heart works is key to developing new treatments for acute and chronic heart diseases such as cardiac arrhythmias. Lethal cardiac arrhythmias such as atrial fibrillation, ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation are associated with the occurrence of abnormal electrical activity in the heart. Often this activity takes the form of self-sustaining, rotating sources of excitation that stimulate the heart to contract rapidly, repetitively and inefficiently. However, the mechanisms underlying the generation, breakdown and spatio-temporal dynamics of these lethal sources under various pathological conditions remain poorly understood. I use an interdisciplinary bottom-up approach based on computational modelling and concomitant experiments to investigate the dynamics of abnormal excitation waves in the heart at the cellular, tissue and organ levels. In this seminar, I will show how I construct a cardiac cell model based on whole-cell patch-clamp data (Majumder et al., PloS Comp Biol., 2016), extend this model to construct simulated cell culture platforms for studying spatiotemporal control over the dynamics of abnormal excitation waves in real time (Majumder et al., eLife, 2018; selected for eLife Digest), and finally, demonstrate the power of computational modelling at the organ level, by studying the effects of introducing new engineered ion channels into cardiac myocytes (Majumder et al., eLife, 2020).

Biography