Sadayappan Lab

Dr. Sadayappan received an Indo-German Exchange Fellowship (DAAD) during his PhD work in India, enabling him to visit the lab of Hans-Peter Vosberg, MD/PhD, at the Max-Planck-Institute in Bad Nauheim, Germany, to complete part of his doctoral work. He then received his PhD in Biochemistry in 1999 from Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, India, under the supervision of Chellam Rajamanickam, PhD. His thesis was entitled “Molecular Aspects of Cardiac Hypertrophy”. Upon completion of his graduate studies in India, he returned to the Vosberg Laboratory for his first postdoctoral fellowship to acquire greater expertise in the pathogenesis of cardiomyopathies.

For his second round of postdoctoral studies, he accepted a post to work with Jeffrey Robbins, PhD, at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. This offered him the opportunity to advance his understanding of the functional consequences of contractile protein phosphorylation and cardiac function using transgenic mouse models. He continued to pursue his primary research to understand the disease mechanisms underlying heart failure. Specifically, he focused on the structural and regulatory functions of cardiac myosin binding protein-C (cMyBP-C).

The current interests of the lab are focused on:

• Determining the molecular mechanism of familial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and inflammation that arises from mutations in the cMyBP-C gene
• Determining how cMyBP-C stability and phosphorylation directly affect the heart’s contractile properties and sarcomere organization
• Defining the specific role of slow and fast MyBP-C in skeletal muscles