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Towards understanding the myometrial physiome: approaches for the construction of a virtual physiological uterus

Premature labour (PTL) is the single most significant factor contributing to neonatal morbidity in Europe with enormous attendant healthcare and social costs. Consequently, it remains a major challenge to alleviate the cause and impact of this condition. Our ability to improve the diagnosis and trea...

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Autores principales: Taggart, Michael John, Blanks, Andrew, Kharche, Sanjay, Holden, Arun, Wang, Bin, Zhang, Henggui
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2007
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1892060/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17570163
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2393-7-S1-S3
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author Taggart, Michael John
Blanks, Andrew
Kharche, Sanjay
Holden, Arun
Wang, Bin
Zhang, Henggui
author_facet Taggart, Michael John
Blanks, Andrew
Kharche, Sanjay
Holden, Arun
Wang, Bin
Zhang, Henggui
author_sort Taggart, Michael John
collection PubMed
description Premature labour (PTL) is the single most significant factor contributing to neonatal morbidity in Europe with enormous attendant healthcare and social costs. Consequently, it remains a major challenge to alleviate the cause and impact of this condition. Our ability to improve the diagnosis and treatment of women most at risk of PTL is, however, actually hampered by an incomplete understanding of the ways in which the functions of the uterine myocyte are integrated to effect an appropriate biological response at the multicellular whole organ system. The level of organization required to co-ordinate labouring uterine contractile effort in time and space can be considered immense. There is a multitude of what might be considered mini-systems involved, each with their own regulatory feedback cycles, yet they each, in turn, will influence the behaviour of a related system. These include, but are not exclusive to, gestational-dependent regulation of transcription, translation, post-translational modifications, intracellular signaling dynamics, cell morphology, intercellular communication and tissue level morphology. We propose that in order to comprehend how these mini-systems integrate to facilitate uterine contraction during labour (preterm or term) we must, in concert with biological experimentation, construct detailed mathematical descriptions of our findings. This serves three purposes: firstly, providing a quantitative description of series of complex observations; secondly, proferring a database platform that informs further testable experimentation; thirdly, advancing towards the establishment of a virtual physiological uterus and in silico clinical diagnosis and treatment of PTL.
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spelling pubmed-18920602007-06-15 Towards understanding the myometrial physiome: approaches for the construction of a virtual physiological uterus Taggart, Michael John Blanks, Andrew Kharche, Sanjay Holden, Arun Wang, Bin Zhang, Henggui BMC Pregnancy Childbirth Proceedings Premature labour (PTL) is the single most significant factor contributing to neonatal morbidity in Europe with enormous attendant healthcare and social costs. Consequently, it remains a major challenge to alleviate the cause and impact of this condition. Our ability to improve the diagnosis and treatment of women most at risk of PTL is, however, actually hampered by an incomplete understanding of the ways in which the functions of the uterine myocyte are integrated to effect an appropriate biological response at the multicellular whole organ system. The level of organization required to co-ordinate labouring uterine contractile effort in time and space can be considered immense. There is a multitude of what might be considered mini-systems involved, each with their own regulatory feedback cycles, yet they each, in turn, will influence the behaviour of a related system. These include, but are not exclusive to, gestational-dependent regulation of transcription, translation, post-translational modifications, intracellular signaling dynamics, cell morphology, intercellular communication and tissue level morphology. We propose that in order to comprehend how these mini-systems integrate to facilitate uterine contraction during labour (preterm or term) we must, in concert with biological experimentation, construct detailed mathematical descriptions of our findings. This serves three purposes: firstly, providing a quantitative description of series of complex observations; secondly, proferring a database platform that informs further testable experimentation; thirdly, advancing towards the establishment of a virtual physiological uterus and in silico clinical diagnosis and treatment of PTL. BioMed Central 2007-06-01 /pmc/articles/PMC1892060/ /pubmed/17570163 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2393-7-S1-S3 Text en Copyright © 2007 Taggart et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Proceedings
Taggart, Michael John
Blanks, Andrew
Kharche, Sanjay
Holden, Arun
Wang, Bin
Zhang, Henggui
Towards understanding the myometrial physiome: approaches for the construction of a virtual physiological uterus
title Towards understanding the myometrial physiome: approaches for the construction of a virtual physiological uterus
title_full Towards understanding the myometrial physiome: approaches for the construction of a virtual physiological uterus
title_fullStr Towards understanding the myometrial physiome: approaches for the construction of a virtual physiological uterus
title_full_unstemmed Towards understanding the myometrial physiome: approaches for the construction of a virtual physiological uterus
title_short Towards understanding the myometrial physiome: approaches for the construction of a virtual physiological uterus
title_sort towards understanding the myometrial physiome: approaches for the construction of a virtual physiological uterus
topic Proceedings
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1892060/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17570163
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2393-7-S1-S3
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