Congratulations to Alex Grassam-Rowe (DPhil in Pharmacology, Year 3) for Nature Communications’ recognition of his work using computational data analytics to reveal a new cell population in the heart.
Nature Communications is an open access journal that publishes high-quality research that represents important advances from across the natural sciences. The Editors highlight a small number of papers to showcase the best papers recently published in an area as a snapshot of the most exciting work in that research area.
The paper, that Alex is co-first author on, entitled ‘Dbh+ catecholaminergic cardiomyocytes contribute to the structure and function of the cardiac conduction system in murine heart’, is the latest paper highlighted by the Editors in 'Translational and Clinical Research'.
In the paper, a global collaboration centred in Oxford reveals a previously unrecognised population of heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes). The researchers used a range of novel techniques to first identify, and then validate, that these cardiomyocytes contain signalling molecules in the same family as adrenaline. Importantly, they demonstrated that when they stopped cardiomyocytes from producing a key enzyme that synthesises these signalling molecules, the heart had slowed conduction between the chambers of the heart. This work has important ramifications for re-examining our current models of how the heart is regulated, and how it communicates with the nervous system, both in health and disease – particularly in heart rhythm disorders.
Alex says: "As a co-first author and having led the computational data analytics workstreams: it was my absolute privilege to collaborate with so many wonderful scientists from across the globe. After teaching myself to code at the start of my DPhil, going through to having my work recognised at the highest level brings me great joy. There were many moments throughout this process of seeing our results and realising that we were making important discoveries known to no-one else in human history at that moment - these were humbling and exciting moments. I am grateful to everyone at Corpus and the Department of Pharmacology for providing the supportive environment in which to do this work, and to the BHF for funding my work."
Read the paper, click here
Read the Editors’ Highlights in Nature Communications here.