Christini Lab

Sudden cardiac death, primarily caused by ventricular arrhythmias, is a major public health problem – it is one of the leading causes of mortality, resulting in more than 350,000 annual deaths in the United States alone. Our group’s efforts are focused on improving our understanding of, and therapies for, cardiac arrhythmias. We primarily investigate biophysical mechanisms of electrophysiological instabilities and arrhythmia onset, from the subcellular to organ level. Because of the complexity of electrophysiological dynamics (both temporal and spatiotemporal), we use a multiscale approach that bridges the gap between physics and biology. Our experiments employ electrophysiological and imaging modalities, primarily at the cellular and tissue levels. We combine our experimental data with clinical data to inform computational cardiac modeling that scales up from the single cell to the whole organ. Such a combination of experimental, computational, and clinical approaches provides the necessary synergy to impact our understanding of cardiac arrhythmias.

Electrophysiological Instabilities and Arrhythmia Onset

Our laboratory utilizes a hybrid approach of computational modeling and experiments to investigate biophysical mechanisms of electrophysiological instabilities and arrhythmia onset from the subcellular to organ level. Such instabilities are a main trigger…

Atrial Tissue Modeling

Atrial fibrillation is an abnormal heart rhythm characterized by rapid and irregular activation of the upper chambers of the heart. Atrial fibrillation often shows a natural progression towards longer and more frequently occurring episodes and often…

Cardiomyocyte Dynamic Clamp

Dynamic clamp is a hybrid computational modeling and patch-clamp approach used in cardiac electrophysiology research. Custom software modules developed in the Real-Time eXperimental Interface (RTXI) framework (www.rtxi.org ) are used to perform real-time…

Cellular Modeling

Ischemia-reperfusion (IR) injury occurs when ischemic tissue experiences a restoration of normal tissue perfusion. IR injury can lead to dangerous arrhythmias such as ventricular tachycardia and fibrillation, that may be even worse than if ischemia…

Real-Time eXperiment Interface

The Real-Time eXperiment Interface (RTXI) is a collaborative open-source software development project aimed at producing a real-time Linux based software system for hard real-time data acquisition and control applications in biological research. We…