Whats the bigger picture that leads you to want to study the molecular mechanisms of muscle contractility?
Smooth muscle is the dominant cell type that is present in all of your hollow organs. So smooth muscle controls basic physiology such as blood pressure, birth, breathing to some degree, the GI system, the bladder. So any sort of disorder or disease that affects smooth muscle can lead to very important changes in your health and well being. My lab is interested in muscle contractility with respect to a number of different diseases. Certainly, we’re interested in the cardiovascular system and how veins and arteries function, or how they become dysfunctional. We have a strong program through the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of Canada looking at smooth muscle effects or dysfunction in diseases like Crohn’s or colitis. Those diseases of the GI system tend to be mediated by inflammation. If there’s an inflammatory insult, that inflammation is transmitted to the muscle layer and affects the motility and the ability of the gut to contract in its rhythmic and normal nature. So we’re intereste
