Rengasayee Veeraraghavan

Research Description:

My laboratory is a biomedical engineering laboratory working to understand the structural underpinnings of electrical signal propagation in the heart, and how their disruption leads to potentially life-threatening arrhythmias (irregular heartbeats). It has become clear over recent years that the hearts physiology at cellular and organ levels is governed by the behavior of handfuls of proteins organized into nano-machines structures 10,000 times smaller than the width of human hair.

We are working to understand the protein composition and structural properties of different nano-machines within muscle cells of normal and diseased hearts. This will help us develop new types of treatments for heart disease, which will restore these nano-machines and thereby, the heart itself, to normal. Our approach to this research uses cutting-edge light and electron microscopy techniques to visualize the protein nano-machines, and computational image analysis techniques to precisely and reliably measure the difference between health and disease at the nano level.

In pursuing this scientific mission, we are often challenged by the limits of current microscopy and image analysis methods. Therefore, a substantial part of our efforts are aimed at inventing new techniques to overcome these limits.