Introduction
The purpose of this site is to provide verified protocols for biology research.
As post-doctoral scholars/junior principle investigators, we have been looking for protocols that we can account for every day. Here, we put all the reliable protocols/reagents we have tested in this site. Unlike those methods described in scientific publications, our methods include great details and useful comments.
We have no intention to commercialize our methods and software. Our goal for this site is simple: make your work more productive and your life much easier, and encourage one another while we are in the same journey.
You can find the methods from the method directory or the search tool on the right.
Feature: please also try our customized, advanced biological method search as well as job search and you may find them cool tools.
New feature:
You can add comments on protocols now. Just go to any individual method page and click on
the "Add a comment" link.
Autophagy hits heart
Autophagy is acutely upregulated to provide necessary nutrients during starvation for survival. Under normal condition, constitutive autophagy is critical to perform house-keeping functions to eliminate damaged organelles and dysfunctional long-lived proteins.
Ageing is associated with accumulation of dysfunctional proteins in cells. Autophagic activity is decreasing along with ageing. Studies in worms and flies show that reconstitution of autophagy can increase life span. A recent report by Taneike and colleagues explored the role of autophagy in age-related cardiomyopathy.
In heart, autophagic activity is decreasing when ageing. Taneike et al eliminated autophagy in heart by knocking out an essential gene, ATG5, specifically in heart. The researchers found deteriorated cardiac function at 10 months of age in the deficient animals compared to wild type controls. The dysfunction of autophagy causes accumulation of dysfunctional mitochondrial, reduced mitochondrial efficiency and significant oxidative damage in cardiomyocytes. More interestingly, evidence of mitochondrial damage is obvious as early as 3 months old, before cardiac remodeling and dysfunction manifest. This study points to a possibility that autophagy is critical in maintaining cardiomyocyte homeostasis and autophagy may be a target for future therapeutic design for heart failure....
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