Our studies focus on understanding how muscle contraction is regulated at the level of the sarcomere in response to Ca2+ and how the regulation is altered in disease states. Most of our work has concentrated on two inherited heart disorders, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), both of which can be caused by mutations in genes that encode components of the contractile apparatus. More recently, we have started to investigate novel post-translational mechanisms and have begun work on disease mechanisms in inherited skeletal muscle myopathies.