Ted Huiatt is an associate professor of biochemistry and animal science. For more than a decade, he has been studying a muscle protein called titin. Titin was discovered in 1979 and is now recognized as a major contributor to muscle function and structure.
Many questions remain about the role of titin.
But Huiatt's work is attempting to uncover more information about why titin is important. He has to understand how the car works before he can figure out what's wrong and how to fix it. Much of the research in Huiatt's lab has been geared to learning how titin works. Some work has shown titin may act as a sort of scaffold to help pull together the other muscle proteins. Huiatt says if this muscle assembly process is disrupted, the result is muscle disease.