A paper produced by an interdisciplinary team, which includes Professor Barry Potter and Dr Joanna Swarbrick of the Department of Pharmacy & Pharmacology, has been chosen as Paper of the Week by the prestigious US Journal of Biological Chemistry.
The paper – NAADP mediated calcium signalling and arrhythmias in the heart evoked by β-adrenergic stimulation - was identified by the journal as in the top two per cent in terms of ‘significance and overall importance’ of more than 6,000 papers received this year.
It covers the discovery of a new target for anti-arrhythmia therapy in the heart, based around a cellular messenger molecule called NAADP, and employing a synthetic tool designed at the University.
The multi-centered European team of researchers from the Universities of Bath, Hamburg, Vienna and Paris is partially funded by a joint Wellcome Trust grant to Professor Potter and the Hamburg group leader Professor Andreas Guse.
Professor Potter said “One of the current major challenges in the life sciences is to make synergistic use of many different individual disciplines to a common end: the understanding of Biology in terms of Chemistry,”
“Cellular signalling processes, in particular, underpin a vast amount of modern biology.
“Designing synthetic compounds that can interfere with cell signalling is a topical and important part of modern drug design that fits perfectly within the scientific mission of our department and the Medicinal Chemistry Group in particular.
“Such compounds are useful tools for studying signalling pathways in cells and can identify novel pathways and targets for drug design.”
The paper appears on the Papers of the Week page of the Journal of Biological Chemistry under week heading 31 May.
This also comes hot-on-the-heels of similar recognition for a purely mechanistic chemical paper from Professor Potter’s group co-authored by Pharmacy & Pharmacology colleagues Drs Himali Godage, Andrew Riley, Tim Woodman, Mark Thomas and Mary Mahon of the Chemistry Department.
This paper - Regioselective opening of myo-inositol orthoesters: mechanism and synthetic utility – appeared earlier this year in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Organic Chemistry as a “Featured Article”, meaning that it was placed in the top 10% of published work.
Cardiac cells responding to the cellular messenger NAADP