Understanding cardiac calcium signaling through computation: The Calcium, Calmodulin, Calcineurin signaling ‘triad’


Abstract: Calcium signaling underlies a rich variety of physiological processes in eukaryotic systems. At the cellular level, calcium signaling is controlled through the activities of calcium ‘handling’ proteins, their subcellular distribution and how these proteins work in concert to modulate cell functions. Quantitative insights into such processes can therefore benefit from computational modeling performed at and between multiple scales, from a single atom to the entire cell. In this presentation, I will summarize contributions from my lab toward the multiscale computational modeling of a calcium-dependent pathway: the ‘calcium/calmodulin/calcineurin triad’. These contributions span applications of molecular dynamics, systems biology, reaction diffusion modeling and computer vision techniques to probe molecular through cellular details of this triad’s function. Given the ubiquity and importance of calcium, calmodulin and calcineurin-dependent signaling in a variety of cell types, we anticipate our techniques can give new insights into human health and disease.