When a young athlete suddenly dies of a heart attack, chances are high that they suffer from familial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). Itis the most common genetic heart disease in the US and affects an estimated 1 in 500 people around the world. A protein called myosin acts as the molecular motor which makes the muscles in the heart contract. Researchers had suspected for some time that the R403Q mutation in some of the myosin genes is among those that play a role in causing HCM. But experiments using mice models failed to show that this was indeed the case.
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Published on: 15 Oct 2018
