D. Brian Foster Ph.D.

Principal Investigator
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Division of Cardiology
Director, Laboratory of Cardiovascular Biochemistry
The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
dbrianfoster@jhmi.edu

Brian hails from Canada, born in Québec City, Québec (Oui, c’est vrai!). He graduated from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, with a Ph.D. in biochemistry. There, he studied both smooth muscle and cardiac muscle contractile proteins, caldesmon and troponin I (TnI) respectively, in the Laboratory of Dr. Jennifer Van Eyk. He moved to Boston where he received an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship to continue the study of his favorite proteins from a structural perspective. Under Dr. William Lehman of the Boston University School of Medicine and Dr. Albert Wang, formerly of the Boston Biomedical Research Institute, Brian investigated the conformation of caldesmon on reconstituted thin filaments, and its regulation by phosphorylation, using 3D helical image reconstruction of electron micrographs he acquired in the lab of Dr. Roger Craig. He also showed that the C-terminus of troponin I plays a role in proper thin filament activation by examining the effect of mutant troponin, bearing a TnI truncation, on actin-tropomyosin structures in the presence or absence of Ca²⁺.

Brian came to The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Division of Cardiology seeking new opportunities apply his training in biochemistry to some of the big issues in heart disease. First under Dr. Eduardo Marbán, then as a junior faculty Research Associate under Dr. Brian O’Rourke, he spent much of his time searching for identity of the elusive cardioprotective MitoK_ATP channel. It was at this time that he began to embrace the techniques and technologies of proteomics that ultimately led to the discovery of mitoROMK – the strongest candidate yet for the pore-forming subunit MitoK_ATP. Brian also teamed up with Dr. Anthony Cammarato to conduct the first ever proteomic analysis of the Cardiac tube of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.

Now as an Assistant Professor, in the Division of Cardiology, Brian continues to make proteomics an integral part of his research, as you will see from the description of the lab core projects. His interests are broad, ranging from cardioprotection by preconditioning, to understanding the sarcomeric cardiomyopathies and heart failure. There are themes, however. He is particularly interested the interplay between the myofilaments, the major consumers of ATP in the heart, and the major source of ATP – the mitochondria. And though he hasn’t abandoned his reductionist roots in protein chemistry, he is now intent on understanding the properties of protein and post-translational modification networks, particularly in the context of cardiomyopathy and heart failure.