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Related Experiment Videos

SarcTrack.

Christopher N Toepfer1,2,3, Arun Sharma1, Marcelo Cicconet4

  • 1From the Department of Genetics (C.N.T., A.S., A.C.G., M.N., J.A.L.W., R.A., M.S., J.R., O.P., J.G.S., C.E.S.), Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.

Circulation Research
|February 1, 2019
PubMed
Summary

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This summary is machine-generated.

A new software, SarcTrack, directly tracks sarcomeres in human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs). This tool enables rapid, automated analysis of cardiac muscle contraction for disease modeling and drug screening.

Area of Science:

  • Cardiovascular Biology
  • Stem Cell Research
  • Biotechnology

Background:

  • Human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs) are valuable for studying cardiac conditions.
  • Immature sarcomeres in hiPSC-CMs pose challenges for accurate contractility analysis.
  • Current methods for assessing cardiomyocyte contractility are often low-throughput or indirect.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To develop a direct, rapid, and automated platform for tracking sarcomeres in beating hiPSC-CMs.
  • To enable quantitative assessment of sarcomere content, contraction, and relaxation parameters.
  • To facilitate high-throughput analysis of cardiomyocyte contractile function.

Main Methods:

  • Developed SarcTrack, a MatLab software utilizing fluorescently tagged sarcomeres.
Keywords:
MYK-461cardiomyocyte contractilitycell imaginghypertrophic cardiomyopathyinduced pluripotent stem cellsmyosin binding protein-Csarcomeres

Related Experiment Videos

  • Algorithm quantifies sarcomere content, length, contraction, and relaxation rates.
  • Validated SarcTrack using drug-treated hiPSC-CMs and a MYBPC3 hypertrophic cardiomyopathy model.

    • Main Results:

    • SarcTrack rapidly measures hundreds of sarcomeres per cell, generating large datasets.
    • Confirmed known drug effects on contractility (CK-1827452, MYK-461, verapamil, propranolol).
    • Recapitulated hypertrophic cardiomyopathy phenotypes in MYBPC3 hiPSC-CMs, with normalization by MYK-461.

    Conclusions:

    • SarcTrack offers a direct and efficient method for quantitative sarcomere function assessment.
    • The platform overcomes technical limitations in hiPSC-CM contractility analysis.
    • SarcTrack accelerates research on sarcomere-regulating therapeutics and human cardiac genetic variants.