Padrón Raúl Alejandro

Padrón work started at Cambridge´s MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Padrón founded I.V.I.C.´s Center of Structural Biology, where he was an International Research Scholar of Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His group found by cryo-electron microscopy that in thick filaments of tarantula muscle the two heads form the myosin interacting-heads motif (IHM), where both ATPases were inhibited explaining relaxation (Nature 436: 1195, 2005). Their showing that IHM is conserved since before the origin of animals revealed IHM importance as a relaxation ATPase inhibition and ATP energy-saving mechanism. They proposed a cooperative phosphorylation activation mechanism that explains potentiation and post-tetanic potentiation on tarantula contracting muscles. They found that hypertrophic cardiomyopathy mutations cluster on IHM intramolecular interactions accounting for hypercontractility, reduced relaxation, and increased energy consumption of this pathogenesis. Honors: 1991 Polar Prize, 2008 Science and Technology National Prize of Venezuela. Elected Member of the Latin-American Academy of Sciences in 2002 and International Member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. in 2018.