DATE:

Friday, November 1, 2019

TIME:

3:30 PM

LOCATION:

GMCS-314

SPEAKER:

Dr. Yasser Aboelkassem, Assistant Research Scientist, Department of Bioengineering, UCSD.

ABSTRACT:

Sarcomeric missense mutations affect striated muscle contractility and can lead to
various types of inherited cardiac diseases such as, hypertrophic and dilated
cardiomyopathies. The majority of these mutations have found to be distributed
on residues located at the interfaces of many proteins of the sarcomere that regulates
cardiac contraction. These mutations and post-translational modifications influence
not only contraction dynamics, but affect myofilament calcium sensitivity and alter
cooperative interactions between the sarcomere regulatory proteins. Although,
several Monte Carlo type myofilament models attempt to investigate and/or to
predict the functional effects of point mutations on sarcomere contractility.
The exact molecular-to-filament mechanism by which these alterations provide the
trigger for disease progression and remodeling is still remaining poorly understood.

In this talk, I will present a stochastic multiscale (molecular-to-filament)
myofilament model that can describe the activation process of the thin filament
during sarcomere contraction. The model is based on the Brownian flashing ratchet
theory for the molecular scale and is using Langevin dynamics principle for the
filament scale. This model is then integrated in a finite element model of virtual
cohorts to study the electro-mechanical coupling of tissue and organ scales. The
model is then used to predict the phenotype remodeling of cardiac function during
arrhythmia and heart failure.

Bio: Dr. Yasser Aboelkassem is currently an Assistant
Research Scientist in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
He completed his BSc in Aerospace Engineering at Cairo University. He then obtained
a MS degree in Computational Mechanics from a joint program between Concordia-McGill Universities,
Montreal, Canada. He received his MS in Applied Mathematics and his PhD in Engineering Science,
both from Virginia Tech. He was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering
and Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, and prior to that He was a Postdoctoral Fellow in
The Department of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University. He recently obtained his mini-MBA
degree from Rady School of Management at UCSD.

Dr. Aboelkassem’s research focuses on hemodynamics,
microcirculation, and fluid transport in the human cardiovascular system, as well as multiscale
modeling of cardiac mechanics. He uses computational and experiments tools to investigate the
relationships between the cellular and extracellular structure of cardiac muscle and the hemodynamics,
electrical, and mechanical function of the whole heart during cardiac diseases.

HOST:

Ricardo Carretero, Department of Mathematics and Statistics

DOWNLOAD:

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