Seminario - Biotecnologie e Bioscienze - Giovedì 25 giugno 2026, 16.00, aula Sironi (U4-08).
Peter Kohl , University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.
Abstract
The heart is an amazing organ. It beats once per second, about 1 million times every ten days, and if it stops – so does life. The volume it pumps in a year is equivalent to that of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Pumping itself involves intra-cardiac volume redistribution between atria and ventricles, without a discernible change in the overall external volume, occupied by the blood-filled heart. This mechanical activity results from electrically-orchestrated contractions of billions of individual heart muscle cells. Each of them displays slightly different stress-strain behaviour, depending on the local mechanical environment, which differs as a function for example of basico-apical, and transmural positions. The mechanical environment furthermore changes, in regionally differing ways, with any alteration in pre- (volume) or after- (pressure) load, such as on every breath we take, when we change posture, or during exercise. The matching of local mechanical activity to global demand requires finely tuned auto-regulatory abilities, and all that in the absence of the kind of neuro-muscular junctions that tune skeletal myofibre activity. In addition, the cross-talk between electrics and mechanics is far from uni-directional, as electrical excitation and conduction, as well as the mechanisms underlying electro-mechanical coupling, are exquisitely mechano-sensitive. Add to this the observation that the heart contains more non-myocytes than muscle cells, combined with recent insight into electrical coupling between those different cell populations, and it becomes clear that we need to take a fresh look at intriguing non-canonical aspects of cardiac structure and function that extend beyond current textbook knowledge.
Ospite: Rocchetti, Lodola
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