Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute

About: Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute is a nonprofit organization based out in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Mechanosensitive channels & Heart failure. The organization has 708 authors who have published 1599 publications receiving 70035 citations.

Toward a structural blueprint for bilayer-mediated channel mechanosensitivity.

Abstract: Bacterial mechanosensitive (MS) channels serve as excellent model systems to study the basic mechanisms underlying bilayer-mediated channel mechanosensitivity. There is extensive evidence showing t...

Primary Graft Dysfunction After Heart Transplantation

Abstract: Primary graft dysfunction (PGD) is a life-threatening complication of heart transplantation that presents as left, right, or biventricular dysfunction occurring within the first 24 hours of transplant surgery for which there is no identifiable secondary cause. Myocardial injury caused by acute catecholamine toxicity and the release of multiple proinflammatory mediators in the donor, followed by ischaemia-reperfusion injury sustained during retrieval, have been considered the predominant pathogenetic processes leading to PGD. Donor, recipient, and procedural factors contribute to the development and severity of the clinical syndrome. The changing donor and recipient characteristics over the last two decades, particularly the increasing donor and recipient age, have led to heightened risk of PGD. PGD is graded from mild to severe depending on the extent of circulatory support that is required to maintain haemodynamic stability and vital organ function. While advances in acute mechanical support devices have improved the outlook for patients with PGD, the rate of mortality remains high for those with severe PGD, reaching 40 %. Potential approaches to preventing or minimising the severity of PGD include optimising donor management, donor heart preservation, and donor/recipient matching.

Falco: a quick and flexible single-cell RNA-seq processing framework on the cloud.

Abstract: Summary Single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) is increasingly used in a range of biomedical studies. Nonetheless, current RNA-seq analysis tools are not specifically designed to efficiently process scRNA-seq data due to their limited scalability. Here we introduce Falco, a cloud-based framework to enable paralellization of existing RNA-seq processing pipelines using big data technologies of Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark for performing massively parallel analysis of large scale transcriptomic data. Using two public scRNA-seq datasets and two popular RNA-seq alignment/feature quantification pipelines, we show that the same processing pipeline runs 2.6-145.4 times faster using Falco than running on a highly optimized standalone computer. Falco also allows users to utilize low-cost spot instances of Amazon Web Services, providing a ∼65% reduction in cost of analysis. Availability and implementation Falco is available via a GNU General Public License at https://github.com/VCCRI/Falco/. Contact j.ho@victorchang.edu.au. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.