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.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article