About

Welcome to the Myolab#

We are a research lab in the Department of Kinesiology at the College of William & Mary.

We study muscle and myosin motors. Myo- is the greek prefix meaning muscle which forms the basis for many muscle related terms in physiology: myocyte (a muscle cell), myofilament (sarcomere components), and of course, myosin (the motor protein in muscle). Therefore, the interests of the lab is anything myo-related.

Primarily, we take a molecular biophysics approach to understand how skeletal and cardiac muscles produce force and motion, how contractile dysfunction leads to disease, and if this dysfunction can be reversed with drugs and/or exercise. We are equally interested in the entire myosin superfamily of proteins that are involved in a wide variety of physiological processes.

Our lab’s research techniques involve using 1) single- and multi-molecule optical trapping experiments and 2) in vitro motility assays to study muscle contraction and myosins at the molecular level. We also use open source tools to perform computational modeling of related processes and develop our own open source software to automate data analysis.