Dr Carolyn Lam: Welcome to Circulation on the Run, your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to The Journal and its editors. I'm Dr Carolyn Lam, Associate Editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore. Dr Greg Hundley: And, I'm Greg Hundley, Associate Editor, Director of the Poly Heart Center of VCU Health in Richmond, Virginia. Well, Carolyn, this week's feature articles, very interesting, discussing hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and sudden death in young individuals. But, let's save all the details for later and start in on our coffee chat. So, Carolyn, have you got a paper that you'd like to start with? Dr Carolyn Lam: I have, and it's a basic science paper. It's one that details the contribution of get this, M-C-U-B. Now this is a paralogue of the poor forming sub-unit MCU in mitochondrial calcium, uniporter regulation and function. Now, this paper shows, for the first time, MCUB's relevance to cardiac physiology, and it's from corresponding author Dr Elrod from Center of Translational Medicine, Louis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia, and their coauthors, who showed, in a series of elegant work, that MCUB is absent from the uniporter complex in the homeostatic heart. But it's incorporated into the mitochondrial calcium uniporter following ischemic injury and thus represents an endogenous mechanism to limit mitochondrial calcium overload during stress. Interestingly, the increased incorporation of MCUB into this mitochondrial calcium uniporter is too little and too late to limit acute cell death following ischemic reperfusion injury but may limit cell loss during chronic stress. Dr Greg Hundley: So Carolyn, tell me what are the clinical implications of this important finding? Dr Carolyn Lam: Well, simply put, MCUB represents a novel therapeutic target to modulate mitochondrial calcium uptake in disease states speech during mitochondrial calcium overload such as myocardial infarction and heart failure. Dr Greg Hundley: Very nice, Carolyn. Well, I've got another basic science paper and it involves Protein Kinase N and how that promotes stress induced cardiac dysfunction through phosphorylation of myocardin-related transcription factor A and disruption of its interaction with actin. This comes from the corresponding author Mikito Takefuji from Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine. So Carolyn protein phosphorylation of course, is a major and essential intracellular mechanism that mediates various cellular processes in cardiomyocytes, in response, extracellular and intracellular signals. The RHOA-associated protein kinase, or ROCK Rho-kinase, in effect, are regulated by the small GTPS RHOA causes pathological phosphorylation of proteins resulting in cardiovascular diseases. RHOA also activates Protein Kinase N, however, and the role of PKN in cardiovascular disease remains unclear. Dr Carolyn Lam: Ah, okay. So with that background, what did these authors find, Greg? Dr Greg Hundley: Great question, Carolyn. What they found is that PKN inhibits the binding of MRTFA to G-actin by phosphorylating MRTFA and activating SRF mediated expression of cardiac hypertrophy and also fibrosis associated genes. Also, they showed that cardiomyocyte specific PKN1 and PKN2 double deficient mice are resistant to pressure overload and ANGII induced cardiac dysfunction. Dr Carolyn Lam: Wow. There's a lot of letters in what you just said. So could you just tell us how does this impact heart failure research and management? Dr Greg Hundley: So Carolyn, this PKN family appears to play a role in regulating hypertrophy and fibrosis in the heart and therefore could serve as a unique target for therapeutic interventions for heart failure in the future. And so maybe it's going to make its way your way. Dr Carolyn Lam: Well, okay, well this next paper definitely is making its way my way and it focuses on the Sodium Glucose Co-transporter two inhibitors or SGLT-2 inhibitors, which we kno