Nuclear receptor co-regulators in heart disease and inflammation; new targets for fine-tuning receptor actions in health and disease

Summary Nuclear receptors associate with co-regulatory proteins to modulate gene transcription: These co-regulators can have profound effects on receptor activity and may be targeted therapeutically for the treatment of a range of diseases. Our lab has identified several novel mineralocorticoid receptor (MR) co-regulators from the heart and kidney that control the overall activity of the MR and, importantly, its response to antagonists.

Project Details

Tissue culture approaches will be used to investigate how one or more novel coregulators modify MR function in heart and kidney cells under normal conditions, in stressed cells and in response to different hormone ligands of the MR. This project can be combined with a second project offered in this laboratory investigating other transcriptional partners for steroid hormone receptors, the HDAC family of transcriptional regulations. In this way, we hope to identify novel mechanisms of heart disease, determine the optimal way to treat patients and avoid the serious side effects of current treatments.
This project will include a suite of molecular biology techniques, cell culture, CoIP, western blotting, and RT PCR.