Dr. Alexandre Fabiato
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Contact Information
Department of Physiology and Biophysics Virginia Commonwealth University P.O. Box 980551 Richmond, Virginia 23298-0551 Fax: 804-828-7382 email: fabiato@vcu.edu |
Alexandre Fabiato completed his undergraduate work in Mathematics (B.S. 1954), his M.D. with a specialty in Cardiology (1969), and his Ph.D. in Physiology in 1970 at the University of Paris, France. Dr. Fabiato was a "Chef de Clinique Cardiologique" in Paris and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School before he joined the department in 1975.
Teaching
Dr. Fabiato teaches in PHIS 604 (Cell Physiology) and has designed two courses for the premedical Certificate Students: PHIS 512 (Cardiac and Exercise Physiology, 3 credits) and PHIS 514 (Cardiovascular Hemodynamics, 2 credits). He directs both courses, and several other lecturers participate in teaching them.
Research
The focus of Dr. Fabiato's research is skeletal muscle and cardiac muscle excitation-contraction coupling. The preparations that have been developed in Dr. Fabiato's laboratory are fragments of single cells from which the sarcolemma is removed by microdissection. This permits direct access to the subcellular organelles controlling excitation-contraction coupling: sarcoplasmic reticulum and myofilaments.
Several years ago it was decided that cardiac cells did not offer enough spatial resolution to address the remaining questions concerning the mechanism of cardiac excitation-contraction coupling. Therefore, a new preparation was developed using the striated muscle cells with the longest sarcomere ever recorded in the animal kingdom, those of the proventriculus of the marine worm, Syllis spongiphila. The ultimate goal of this new axis of research consists in studying under confocal microscopy the propagation of calcium sparks through the giant sarcomere (more than 50 micron long) of isolated striated muscle cells from this tissue. Isolated cells were indeed obtained from this worm muscle, which appear morphologically intact but do not respond to ionic changes in the solution as should be expected for intact muscle cells.
To assess this problem electrophysiological experiments are planned in, first, the intact, multicellular, proventiculus of the worm and, thereafter, the isolated cells. This requires the development of electrophysiological techniques, which is done currently on mammalian cardiac cells that are kindly provided by Dr. Baumgarten's laboratory and are much easier to work with than the worms. When these electrophysiological techniques are developed they will be applied initially to the study of the intact multicellular proventriculus because although this muscle is anatomically striated it responds to some cholinergic mediators in a manner similar to that of smooth musle cells. Therefore, although the overall project is ambitious and with an uncertain outcome, its development requires short-term studies with a potentially very interesting outcome. At the present time no training opportunities are available in my research program.
Selected Publications
Fabiato, A. Rapid ionic modifications during the aequorin-detected calcium transient in a skinned canine cardiac Purkinje cell. J. Gen. Physiol. 85: 189-246, 1985 PubMed
Fabiato, A. Time and calcium dependence of activation and inactivation of calcium-induced release of calcium from the sarcoplasmic reticulum of a skinned canine cardiac Purkinje cell. J. Gen. Physiol. 85: 247-289, 1985 PubMed
Fabiato, A. Simulated calcium current can both cause calcium loading in and trigger calcium release from the sarcoplasmic reticulum of a skinned canine cardiac Purkinje cell. J. Gen. Physiol. 85: 291-320, 1985. PubMed