THE workings of an enzyme which is thought to play a role in damaging heart muscle during a heart attack have been revealed for the first time.

Researchers at Dundee University have begun unravelling how an enzyme known as DHHC5 behaves during a cardiac arrest, potentially paving the way to a drug which could limit its harmful effect on heart muscle.

DHHC5 was already known to be essential for all sorts of biological processes, including helping to establish short term memory in the brain. It was suspected to be one of the most important controllers of injury to the muscle in the heart during a heart attack but until now it was not understood how DHHC5 worked.

Now Dr Will Fuller and colleagues in Dundee University's Medical Research Institute, working with colleagues at the Universities of Edinburgh and Leeds and King's College London, have established details of the role of DHHC5 and how it carries it out. Dr Fuller's team found that during a heart attack, DHHC5 becomes overactive and this causes damage to the heart muscle.

Dr Fuller said: "There are multiple implications arising from our research.

"DHHC5 is a member of a family of enzymes which are implicated in progression of a variety of clinical conditions, including neurological diseases and cancer. So knowing more about how it works could lead to significant developments in those disease areas.

"Secondly, understanding how DHHC5 works raises the possibility that drugs may be able selectively to manipulate its activity... "This means we might be able to interfere with the 'bad' things this enzyme does, like damaging heart muscle during a heart attack, without affecting the 'good' things such as establishing memories in the brain."

The results of the research,are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.