Oklahoma Society of Physiologists
21st Annual Meeting
June 7, 2002
Oklahoma City, OK
We had a great meeting in Oklahoma City last June with Dr. Foreman and
the OUHSC Department of Physiology hosting. We all met on Friday morning,
June 7, around 9:00 am with plenty of donuts, coffee, and juice to get us
started. After mingling a while we went to the meeting room for our oral
and poster presentations. I want to thank those who put up their posters
and those who gave talks. They were all well presented and generated much
interesting discussion. A brief summary is given below.
Michele Bucholtz, OSU-CHS
Title: Acute Cardiac Induces Apoptosis in the Rat Heart and Kidney:
Michele is a DO/PhD student working on her PhD project investigating the
effects of cytokines such as TNF-a and the interleukins released via
myocardial ischemia and their detrimental effect on the kidney. She
presented some of her work at FASEB last April and has collected interesting
preliminary data on this project.
Hamid Akbarali, OUHSC
Title: HERG Potassium Channels
Hamid gave an excellent talk on these K channels and their probable role
in controlling the resting membrane potential in smooth muscle of the gut.
Hamid is a leader in this area with many collaborative contacts. He has
expressed, cloned, and patch clamped these channels.
Al Rouch, OSU-CHS
Title: Simple Lab Method for Teaching Membrane Potentials
Al talked about an easy way for students to learn the fundamentals of
membrane potentials in the lab. Using an Ussing chamber, one can set up an
inexpensive way for students to learn the Nernst potential, Gibbs-Donnan
equilibria, capacitance, differential ion permeability, and calculating how
many ions are required to generate the transmembrane voltage.
Bob Foreman, OUHSC:
Title: Intrinsic Cardiac Nervous System
Bob gave a fascinating presentation on the work he and his collaborators
have been conducting over the years on the nervous control of the heart.
They have made great progress on understanding the underlying causes of
angina pectoris and myocardial ischemia. Their work has led to extensive
clinical studies on treatments for these effects.
After the talks, we had our business meeting, looked at posters, mingled
around a little more, and then took off to the restaurant downtown next to
the ballpark for lunch. It was a great luncheon thanks to Bob Foreman. If
you’re in OK City, check out Coach’s at the Bricktown.
Randy Wymore of Tulsa University is our new President and Charlene
McWhinney of OSU-Center for Health Sciences is the President-elect
Send comments to: Al Rouch, Ph.D., OSU-CHS, 1111 W. 17th
St. Tulsa, OK 74107. Phone: (918) 561-8228 ; FAX (918) 561-8276; e-mail:
rouch@chs.okstate.edu.
