Presentation description

Scientists in the early 2000's discovered a new family of proteins called the EF hand family of proteins. These proteins are calcium binding proteins in the mitochondria that serve two different functions: regulatory and structural. The binding of calcium to the regulatory domain for example causes a conformational change that is transmitted to their target proteins which often catalyze enzymatic reactions. They are involved with many different cellular processes throughout the body like mitosis, synaptic transmission, and cytoskeletal rearrangement. The study that we based our thought processes on was the one done published in Mar, 2022 by Eberhardt et al. (2022) Not much was known at the time about what happens when this superfamily of proteins but through that paper we learned that the common diseases in the heart usually occur due to high amounts of intracellular calcium, that cause changes in contractility, arrhythmias, and mitochondrial dysfunction. Yet in Ef Hand protein -/- mice, they are resistant to hyperoxic injury. We want to know what happens with this protein in the liver in hopes of better understanding the metabolic pathways that the protein participates in as well as understanding how other proteins are upregulated or down regulated.