Research Interests - Dr. Beth Bailey

I am a cardiac physiologist with interests stemming from the organ level (the whole heart) to the cellular (the individual muscle cells), and beyond (sub-cellular organelles, contractile apparatus, etc.).  Since heart disease is a major killer in our country, I (along with lots of others!) am interested in learning more about why the heart works as it does, and why it stops working effectively under certain stresses.  In addition, because epidemiological evidence indicates that premenopausal females exhibit a significantly lower risk of heart disease than do age-matched males, we are studying differences in cardiac function between males and females.

The students in my laboratory are currently testing the following interrelated hypotheses:

1. Basic cardiac function differs between males and females.
2. Male and female hearts respond differently to ischemia (cessation of blood flow) and subsequent reperfusion (return of blood flow).  This is termed ischemia-reperfusion injury and is similar to what happens when a coronary artery is blocked during a “heart attack”.
3. Male and female hearts respond differently to calcium stress.  Calcium is necessary for cardiac contraction, but too much calcium can cause damage during ischemia-reperfusion injury.  Different calcium-handling capabilities between male and female hearts could help explain differences in ischemia-reperfusion injury.

We use a mouse model to give us insights into human differences.  Organ level studies are performed using isolated buffer-perfused whole hearts connected to a force transducer to measure developed force. While these whole-heart studies can provide valuable insights into cardiac function and dysfunction, they cannot answer some important mechanistic questions. Therefore, we also isolate individual cardiac muscle cells (myocytes) from the mouse heart.  We have recently begun to study calcium homeostasis in individual cardiac myocytes isolated from male and female hearts. We use a calcium-sensitive fluorescent dye to measure intracellular calcium while simultaneously measuring sarcomere shortening in electrically-stimulated myocytes.