🚨 We're hiring! Join our @American_Heart-funded team as a Research Assistant to study liver-heart crosstalk in HFpEF. Gain hands-on experience in translational CV research. 📍 UTHealth Houston.📧 Apply: #HeartFailure #LiverResearch #ScienceJobs.

@UTHealthHouston, we are working hard to understand the causes of dementia and develop new strategies to improve the lives of patients and their families. Like many, I witnessed dementia take away the brilliant man that was my grandpa. Let's ensure a better future for all.

Thanks @joanhuffman, @LtGovTX, and the Texas Senate for passing this important legislation! I urge the House and people of Texas to support this opportunity to transform dementia care for all Texans and put Texas at the forefront of dementia research.

I don't think either @thorplab or myself would have imagined that our time together would be as long as it was 😅 but I am grateful for all that we were able to accomplish together and excited for the future. Fin.

In addition to those mentioned, I am grateful for co-first author @GlintonKris who helped finish this story after I moved to @UTHealthHouston to start my lab. I am also grateful for my research assistants, Swapna and Bo Ryung, who performed crucial revision experiments.

Finally, we collaborated with @ionispharma to leverage their antisense oligonucleotides (ASO) targeting AIF1 and found that therapeutically targeting AIF1 after MI, reduced cardiac injury and preserved systolic function.

In subsequent experiments, we found that AIF1 interacted with Rac1 to promote actin remodeling and NADPH oxidase activation. This led to increased levels of reactive oxygen species, which stabilized HIF-1 and promoted increases in macrophage glycolysis and inflammatory function.

AIF1 is an actin binding protein and we were inspired by recent work from @DanuserLab linking actin remodeling to glycolysis Working with @CAM_NUChicago to perform AFM, we found that AIF1 was required for mechanical stiffening of macrophages.

We sought to determine how AIF1 promoted inflammatory activation. We and others previously showed HIF-1 promotes inflammatory glycolytic reprogramming in macrophages and loss of AIF1 reduced macrophage HIF-1 levels and glycolysis after MI, linking AIF1 to macrophage metabolism.

And this was associated with reductions in both inflammatory macrophage activation and cardiac inflammation, suggesting that macrophage AIF1 contributed to worse outcomes after MI.

Through our previous collaboration on AIF1, we were connected to Dr. Nicholas Sibinga @EinsteinMed who generously provided the AIF1 knockout mice. When we subjected these mice to MI, we found that loss of AIF1 led to smaller infarcts and better systolic function after MI.

As this was only 1 patient, we leveraged recent seq data from @KuppeChristoph and @rkramann and found AIF1 gene expression was limited to macrophages in the human heart. Working with investigators from @amsterdamumc, we then found macrophages increased AIF1 protein after MI.

When @LantzConnor ran the informatics on our sample, we were excited to find that AIF1 was the top differentially expressed gene in macrophages! While AIF1 had been found in macrophages in a variety of other disease settings, its role in myocardial infarction (MI) was unknown.

A year later, our lab performed its first ever single cell RNA sequencing experiment on human heart tissue from a patient with a history of heart attack. Since this was our first time using the @10xGenomics platform, we celebrated our gel bead in emulsion with drinks at 2:00AM.

Our lab was first introduced to Allograft Inflammatory Factor 1 (AIF1) by Dr. Anne Rowley @LurieChildrens who was studying its role in children with Kawasaki Disease. Working with Anne, we linked macrophage AIF1 to T cell activation

I am excited to start the new year by sharing my last major contribution from @thorplab just published in @NatureCVR. Link is here and tweetorial is below 🧵.

Congrats to my former @thorplab colleague, @PiccoloEnzo, on his first research article from the lab! He not only mastered a technically challenging model and a notoriously difficult protein but he also expertly navigated the innate challenges of dual mentorship. Magnifique!.

Grateful to receive financial support from our Center for Perioperative Medicine to pursue liver and heart crosstalk during #HeartFailure with my friend and colleague, Dr. Kangho Kim. As a #NewPI, it is a great feeling to have the support of both the department and institution.

RT @melo_cardenas1: I’m thrilled to start as an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University! My lab will be working on inflammation and….

RT @MTBatGSBS: Happening tomorrow! New @MDA_UTHGrad GSBS students interested in joining the MTB program should attend our orientation sessi….