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Quantification of Cardiomyocyte Contraction In Vitro and Drug Screening by MyocytoBeats

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Abstract

Cardiomyocyte contractility is the crucial feature of heart function. Quantifying cardiomyocyte contraction in vitro is essential for disease phenotype characterization, mechanism illumination, and drug screening. Although many experimental methods have been employed to determine contraction dynamics in vitro, a time-saving and easy-to-use software is still needed to be developed. We presented a reliable tool, named MyocytoBeats, to measure cardiomyocyte contraction by processing recorded videos. Analysis results by MyocytoBeats of various experimental models have shown a significant linear relationship with another validated software. We also performed pharmacology screen in the platform, and astragaloside IV was identified to stabilize the frequency and amplitude of cardiomyocyte in the arrhythmia model. MyocytoBeats is a high-performance tool for generating cardiomyocyte contraction data of vitro study and shows a great potential in cardiac pharmacology study.

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Data Availability

The source code of MyocytoBeats is avaliable upon required.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFC1700402), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (82270350), fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (22120220162), and the Frontier Science Research Center for Stem Cells, Ministry of Education.

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Author notes

  1. Zhiyang Cheng and Yuxin Yang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Shanghai Fourth People’s Hospital, School of Life and Sciences and Technology, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200092, China

    Zhiyang Cheng, Yuxin Yang, Kai Jiang, Xingbo Yang, Zizhuo Tu & Yaozu Xiang

  2. School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China

    Hongyi Nie

  3. Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, London, UK

    Jiayi Liang

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  1. Zhiyang Cheng
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Contributions

YX designed the experiments. ZC, YY, KJ, and XY performed the in vitro experiments. ZC, YY, and HYN wrote the MATLAB code. ZC, YY, and ZT analyzed the data. YX, ZC, and HN drafted the article. YX, YY, ZT, and JL revised the manuscript. All the authors read and approved the final manuscript. ZY and YY are co-first authors based on their distinct contributions.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yaozu Xiang.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

Clinical Relevance Statement

MyocytoBeats is a low-cost and high-performance platform to analyze the contraction profile of cardiomyocytes in experimental and clinical settings. Quantifying contraction from various animal models, hiPSC-CM, and cardiac organoids provide an approach for drug screening and cardiac cardiotoxicity assessment. And generating contraction profiles of hiPSC-CM derived from patients of genetic or acquired heart disease could provide clinically relevant insights into disease mechanism and treatment strategies.

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Associate Editor Junjie Xiao oversaw the review of this article.

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Cheng, Z., Yang, Y., Jiang, K. et al. Quantification of Cardiomyocyte Contraction In Vitro and Drug Screening by MyocytoBeats. J. of Cardiovasc. Trans. Res. 16, 758–767 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12265-023-10357-x

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