About

Welcome to Myolab#

Myolab is a research laboratory in the Department of Health Sciences at William & Mary. Our interests are in Muscle Physiology & Molecular Biophysics.

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 lab’s main research questions are anything myo-related!

Primarily, we take a multi-scale approach to understand how muscles work across a range of biological scales, from the level of single molecules to whole muscles. Our research goals are to understand how skeletal and cardiac muscles produce force and motion, how contractile dysfunction leads to disease, and whether this dysfunction can be reversed with drugs and/or exercise. Additionally, 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 single- and multi-molecule optical trapping experiments and in vitro motility assays to study muscle contraction and myosins at the molecular level. We also have ex vivo and in vivo muscle rigs to assess muscle function at the organ and organism level using rodent models. Last, we use open source tools to perform computational modeling of related processes to our research and develop our own open source software to automate data analysis.