Budget Amount *help |
¥4,680,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,600,000、Indirect Cost: ¥1,080,000)
Fiscal Year 2019: ¥1,560,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,200,000、Indirect Cost: ¥360,000)
Fiscal Year 2018: ¥1,690,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,300,000、Indirect Cost: ¥390,000)
Fiscal Year 2017: ¥1,430,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000、Indirect Cost: ¥330,000)
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Outline of Final Research Achievements |
Heart failure is a complex syndrome that results from structural or functional impairment of ventricular filling or blood ejection. Protein phosphorylation is a major and essential intracellular mechanism that mediates various cellular processes in cardiomyocytes in response to extracellular and intracellular signals. We demonstrated that RHOA activates 2 members of the PKN family of proteins, PKN1 and PKN2, in cardiomyocytes of mice with cardiac dysfunction. Cardiomyocyte-specific deletion of the genes encoding Pkn1 and Pkn2 protected mice from pressure overload induced cardiac dysfunction. Furthermore, we identified MRTFA as a novel substrate of PKN1 and PKN2 and found that MRTFA phosphorylation by PKN was considerably more effective than that by ROCK in vitro. Our results indicate that PKN1 and PKN2 activation causes cardiac dysfunction and is involved in the transition to heart failure, thus providing unique targets for therapeutic intervention for heart failure.
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