Chakraborty Lab | Augusta University
Heart Polyploidy and Cardiac Development
The heart is one of the most highly polyploid organs across the animal kingdom. During my postdoctoral training in the Fox Lab at Duke University, I established a Drosophila larval heart model to study the importance of cardiomyocyte polyploidization. We discovered a chamber-specific asymmetry in cardiomyocyte polyploidization that is conserved between Drosophila and human donor hearts and is essential for heart organ shape and function. Click the icon to learn more.
Genetic Screens for Novel Cardiac Ploidy Regulators
To identify novel regulators of cardiomyocyte polyploidy, we developed a Human-to-Fly-to-Human discovery platform that uses human cardiac gene expression data to perform reverse genetic screening in Drosophila and validate conserved regulators in mammalian systems. This approach identified COX7A, a mitochondrial electron transport chain (ETC) protein, as an unexpected negative regulator of cardiomyocyte polyploidy and heart growth, in contrast to most other ETC components, which positively regulate cardiac polyploidization. Using new genetic approaches with intravital optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging of the fly heart, we have uncovered numerous previously unrecognized cardiac-specific regulators of cardiomyocyte polyploidy. Click the icon to learn more.