Swank Lab
Our group studies how muscles have evolved to power many different functions including locomotion and pumping blood. Our projects investigate muscle function at the organismal, whole muscle, cellular, protein, and amino acid level. Currently, our main research focus is in understanding how the structure of myosin contributes to its mechanochemical function in muscle, the structural and kinetic mechanisms that differentiate fast and slow myosin isoforms, and investigating the mechanisms behind stretch activation in heart and insect flight muscle. Located at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, we collaborate with scientists from a wide range of disciplines. Lab members are drawn from the fields of biology, biochemistry, biophysics, biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering, physics, and bioart.
We approach the question of muscle function and motor protein biophysics from many different angles. We generate transgenic fruit fly lines that express mutant or chimeric muscle proteins. The phenotype of the mutants’ muscles are evaluated on our muscle mechanics rigs to determine how the altered proteins affect muscle power production, kinetics, and other mechanical properties. We can test the altered proteins directly by purifying them from the transgenic muscles and performing biochemical and biophysical assays. One favorite undergraduate project involves testing the flight ability of our Drosophila mutants at different temperatures. In the near future, we plan on taking advantage of an optical trap system owned by our Microscopy Core to measure single molecule mechanical properties. We run structural modeling simulations of our transgenic muscle proteins and their interactions with other proteins within the muscle. Almost all of our techniques require dissection of individual muscle fibers or bundles from fruit flies, thus everyone’s hand-eye coordination improves after joining our lab!
Pictured from left: Ryan Koppes, Soyo Lee, Catherine Eldred, Qian Wang, Georgia Yalanis,Mia Corcione, Eric Gamache, Seemanti Ramanath, Dr. Douglas Swank, and Christine Cuiping Zhao. Center top: Drosophila melanogaster, our model organism. Center bottom: Georgia Yalanis, dissecting flies. Right: Charlotte Kaplan, class of 2008 at work.
About us
