Advanced In Vivo Techniques in Cardiovascular Research

TOPICAL COLLECTIONS

Guest Editors

Purnima Singh

University of Tennessee Health Science Center

Dr. Purnima Singh is an instructor in the Department of Pharmacology in the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, Tennessee. Her current research focusses on understanding the mechanisms of hypertension, associated inflammation, and renal pathogenesis in females. Her expertise lies in small animal surgeries including implantation of radiotelemeters, stereotaxic surgery to inject drugs and probes locally in the brain, gonadectomy, nephrectomy, and osmotic pump implantation. Dr. Singh has publications in peer-reviewed journals including Hypertension and American Journal of Physiology. She also serves as a reviewer for scientific journals including American Journal of Pharmacology and Toxicology, International Journal of Cardiovascular research, Journal of Neuroimmunology, Behavioral brain Research. Dr. Singh has won awards for her research contributions including the New Investigator Travel Award by American Heart Association, Best Oral Presentation Award by the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, and Abstract Travel Award by American Physiological Society.

Jennifer Sullivan

Augusta University, Medical College of Georgia

Dr. Jennifer Sullivan is a tenured Professor in the Department of Physiology and an internationally recognized expert in the field of sex differences in cardiovascular and renal physiology. Her work has been continuously funded by the NIH and the American Heart Association. She consistently publishes her work in the top journals in the field of hypertension, with over 100 peer-reviewed articles that have been cited over 2400 times. For her outstanding work, Dr. Sullivan has received numerous prestigious awards including the Inaugural John Laragh Research Award from the American Journal of Hypertension and the Mid-Career Award for Research Excellence from the American Heart Association. As further evidence of her status in the scientific community, she has active leadership roles in national scientific societies such as the American Physiological Society and American Heart Association, serves on several editorial boards and is a standing member of an NIH study section.

Collection Overview

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD), which includes coronary heart disease, heart failure, hypertension, and stroke, are a group of disorders of the heart, kidney, and blood vessels. Improvements in the understanding of the causes and pathogenesis of CVD will result in the development of more effective treatments, improved quality of life for patients, and reductions in healthcare costs. Extensive basic science research has resulted into several clinical trials, but with poor success. The reason for this may be the complexity of studying diseases that impact numerous organ systems at the whole animal level. This increases the demand for intuitive in vivo experimental approaches. It is critical for an experimental approach to determine what is altered in the living hypertensive animal. Implantation of radiotelemeters has made it easy to measure arterial blood pressure in conscious animals, especially when anesthesia can strongly affect the measurement of blood pressure. It is only in the living condition that the role of the central nervous system in the control of vascular and renal function can be adequately assessed. This collection aims to exhibit modern techniques that benefit cardiovascular researchers to study the physiological and pathological changes in CVD, even at the molecular and neuronal level. Some of these techniques include radiotelemetry to measure blood pressure and cardiovascular functions, calcium and cerebrovascular blood flow imaging, in vivo ratiometric optical mapping for cardiac electrophysiology, recording of sympathetic activity or neuronal activity at the central level and even stem cell tracking via imaging during clinical trials.