Michinari Nakamura
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Physiology
Obesity can damage the heart directly, apart from high blood pressure, diabetes or clogged arteries. This condition, obesity cardiomyopathy, thickens and stiffens the heart and can lead to heart failure.
- Fields
Physiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
obesity cardiomyopathy
heart failure with preserved ejection fraction
HFpEF
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2030
What they work on
- Determine whether increased Bcl-xS, a short form of the Bcl2l1 protein, in the spleen protects against heart inflammation and obesity cardiomyopathy, using Bcl-xS knockout mice on a high-fat diet.
- Test how asparagine metabolism in B cells contributes to cardiomyopathy after a high-fat diet or Bcl-xS deletion, using stable-isotope labeling metabolomics and engineered mice.
- Uncover how Bcl-xS suppresses asparagine metabolism in B cells, using proteomics and adeno-associated virus gene delivery.
More about the research
The heart starts burning fat in an uncontrolled way, and the excess fat becomes toxic, a process called lipotoxicity. Because obesity affects the whole body, this project asks whether fat-induced changes in a distant organ, the spleen, help drive heart disease.
Why it matters
Obesity is a leading driver of heart disease and death, and there are few targeted treatments for heart damage caused by obesity itself. By linking the spleen's immune cells to heart inflammation, this work could reveal a new drug target, such as B-cell asparagine metabolism or Bcl2l1 splicing, for preventing or reversing obesity cardiomyopathy.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tammy Kindel
Medical College of Wisconsin, WI·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether the gut microbiome after sleeve gastrectomy raises blood bile acids that activate FXR, a bile-acid sensor, using fecal transfer from operated mice and metagenomic sequencing of rodent and human stool.
Stefano Morotti
University of California-Davis, CA·Physiology
Identify key molecular and cellular changes in excitation-contraction coupling, the link between electrical signals and heartbeats, in a mouse model of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), using functional and transcriptomic data.
Thomas Vondriska
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Physiology
Map gene activity, chromatin accessibility and histone modifications in heart, kidney and liver of ZSF1 rats as HFpEF develops, building the first multi-organ epigenomic atlases of the disease.
The school
Rutgers University-New Brunswick: 57 labs on PI Pages, $837M a year on research, 713 research doctorates a year.
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