Leonardo da Vinci was a real heartbreaker. Five hundred years ago, he produced a series of sketches breaking down the human heart鈥檚 anatomical structure. One part looks like cobblestone and works like 鈥� a golf ball? 黑料吃瓜资源 Assistant Professor Hannah Meyer uses modern data science to pick up where da Vinci left off.
Read the related story: Understanding the inner workings of the human heart
Transcript
Brianne Seviroli: You鈥檙e now At the Lab with 黑料吃瓜资源. My name is Brianne Seviroli and this week At the Lab: 鈥淎 heart of golf.鈥�
{Golf club swings, strikes ball; soft applause}
BS: To any golfers listening, stick with us. Our story begins with something closer to everyone鈥檚 heart. And that is the human heart itself.
BS: When it comes to the heart, there are many mysteries. One in particular dates back centuries. It was stumbled on by none other than Leonardo da Vinci.
BS: About 500 years ago, da Vinci noticed a cobblestone-like pattern of muscles lining the inside wall of the heart. And for 500 years nobody knew why they were arranged like this 鈥� until now.
Hannah Meyer: Let me put it this way. They reduce the odds for heart disease.
BS: That鈥檚 Hannah Meyer, an assistant professor at 黑料吃瓜资源. Meyer took a holistic view to researching heart disease. She compared the organ鈥檚 genetic makeup with its phenotype鈥攈ow it looks and behaves.
HM: I was very interested in organ function as a whole. Can we use the genetics and these phenotypes that we can extract to understand more about the physiology of an organ, both in health and disease? So, we teamed up with bioengineers and with clinical researchers to try and understand a small phenotype in the heart from the perspective of how does it influence the function of the heart.
BS: Using special software, Meyer and her colleagues analyzed the clinical data of 25,000 patients in the UK Biobank. From here, the team was able to see how the heart wall鈥檚 cobblestone-like muscles, called trabeculae, work and develop.
BS: And guess what? It鈥檚 a lot like a golf ball turned inside-out. If you鈥檙e a golfer, you might know that the dimples on the ball reduce air resistance, helping it travel farther. Trabeculae cut down on fluid resistance. Hearts with the right kind of muscle pattern are able to pump blood with less resistance. Their trabeculae branch out in a shape resembling that of the heart. And Meyer鈥檚 team found that patients who have this going on are at lower risk of heart failure.
BS: Meyer has since turned her data-driven research to cancer.
HM: Every piece of software that I鈥檝e developed is on an open platform. There鈥檚 more than 20,000 people who鈥檝e downloaded it.
BS: And that means that thanks to her, we may soon have a better understanding of why many other organs look the way they do. Eat your heart out, da Vinci.
BS: Thanks for listening to At the Lab. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us at www.cshl.edu for more fascinating science stories like this one. For 黑料吃瓜资源, I鈥檓 Brianne Seviroli. And I鈥檒l see you next time At the Lab.