Wai Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2016

Metabolic regulation of mitochondrial morphology

The need for mitochondria in the body is ubiquitous yet the shapes these organelles take vary widely across tissues and change rapidly in response to nutrient availability. How and why this occurs is not well understood. Therefore, we propose an interdisciplinary research program that will investigate the molecular basis and metabolic regulation of mitochondrial morphology. Mitochondrial morphology is defined by opposing events of fission and fusion, which must be tightly controlled. We discovered that accelerated mitochondrial fission impairs cardiac metabolism and causes heart failure in mice, revealing an intriguing link between mitochondrial dynamics and metabolism. Seeking to…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.