DrPradeep Luther

I am Hon Senior Research Fellow in the Cardiac Function Section at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London. I was a member of staff at Imperial from 1980 to the end of 2016. I have been at Imperial since 1971, first for my Physics BSc and then for my PhD in Biophysics.

I have worked in three departments at Imperial: Department of Materials Science, Department of Physics and, since 1999, National Heart and Lung Institute in the Faculty of Medicine. My undergraduate teaching in Medicine included leading the histology lab for 1st Year MBBS and lectures on muscle structure. I have supervised PhD students and many undergraduate projects in my lab, Electron Tomography of Muscle Sarcomere Lab.

My research passion has been, and still is, the structure of muscle – cardiac muscle and skeletal muscle – and the impact of structure on function. It has been a privilege to witness the phenomenal revelations in the structure of muscle starting from the intriguing simple striations visible in a light microscope to the early electron microscope images suggesting gross structure and finally to the mind-boggling atomic structures of the thin and thick filaments. This visual explosion has been due to the “resolution revolution” in electron microscopy – the hand-in-hand developments in sample preparation, cryo-electron microscopy and computing (see my review on cardiac thick filament structure [1]).

I am research-active and have collaborations at Imperial and in USA. See details of our research activities in my lab website: www.sarcomere.org.

Selected Publications
1. Luther, P.K. and S.B. Marston, Complex architecture of cardiac muscle thick filaments revealed. Trends Pharmacol Sci, 2024. 45(3): p. 191-192.
2. Huang, X., et al., Cryo-electron tomography of intact cardiac muscle reveals myosin binding protein-C linking myosin and actin filaments. J Muscle Res Cell Motil, 2023.
3. Millane, R.P., et al., Geometric frustration in the myosin superlattice of vertebrate muscle. J R Soc Interface, 2021. 18(185): p. 20210585.
4. Burgoyne, T., et al., Three-dimensional structure of the basketweave Z-band in midshipman fish sonic muscle. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 2019. 116(31): p. 15534-15539.
5. Luther, P.K., et al., Direct visualization of myosin-binding protein C bridging myosin and actin filaments in intact muscle. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 2011. 108(28): p. 11423-8.
6. Luther, P.K., The vertebrate muscle Z-disc: sarcomere anchor for structure and signalling. J Muscle Res Cell Motil, 2009. 30(5-6): p. 171-85.
7. Luther, P.K., et al., Understanding the organisation and role of myosin binding protein C in normal striated muscle by comparison with MyBP-C knockout cardiac muscle. J Mol Biol, 2008. 384(1): p. 60-72.
8. Luther, P.K., M.C. Lawrence, and R.A. Crowther, A method for monitoring the collapse of plastic sections as a function of electron dose. Ultramicroscopy, 1988. 24(1): p. 7-18.
9. Luther, P.K. and R.A. Crowther, Three-dimensional reconstruction from tilted sections of fish muscle M- band. Nature, 1984. 307(5951): p. 566-8.