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Updated: Nov 4, 2025
Isolation and Physiological Analysis of Mouse Cardiomyocytes
Published on: September 7, 2014
MorphoScript: a dedicated analysis to assess the morphology and contractile structures of cardiomyocytes derived from
Tess Homan1, Hélène Delanoë-Ayari1, Albano C Meli2
1Univ Lyon, Univ Claude Bernard Lyon 1, CNRS, Institut Lumière Matière, Villeurbanne F-69622, France.
Insights
We developed a MATLAB image analysis tool to quantify cardiomyocyte morphology and contractile structures. This tool aids in studying cardiac diseases and drug safety using human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CM).
Area of Science:
- Stem cell biology
- Cardiovascular research
- Biomedical imaging
Background:
- Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) enable the generation of cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CM) for disease modeling and drug screening.
- Characterizing hiPSC-CM morphology and contractile structures is crucial due to their atypical shape compared to native cardiomyocytes.
- Accurate tools are needed to quantify these features for pathological studies, drug screens, and maturation assessments.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop an automated image analysis toolbox for characterizing hiPSC-CM.
- To provide accurate measurements of cellular morphology and contractile cell organization.
- To demonstrate the utility of the toolbox in comparing hiPSC-CM under different culture conditions.
Main Methods:
- Development of a MATLAB-based image analysis toolbox.
- Quantification of cellular morphology parameters.
- Assessment of contractile structure density and organization.
Main Results:
- The toolbox provides accurate quantitative values for hiPSC-CM morphology and contractile organization.
- Demonstrated the tool's effectiveness by comparing hiPSC-CM cultured in standard versus maturation media, and with mouse cardiomyocytes.
- The analysis highlighted differences in maturation status based on culture conditions.
Conclusions:
- The developed MATLAB toolbox offers a robust solution for characterizing hiPSC-CM.
- Enables precise measurements critical for understanding cardiac disease, drug effects, and cell maturation.
- Facilitates standardized analysis of hiPSC-CM for research and therapeutic applications.
Motivation:
Cardiomyocytes derived from stem cells are closely followed, notably since the discovery in 2007 of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC). Cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CM) derived from hiPSC are indeed more and more used to study specific cardiac diseases as well as for developing novel applications such as drug safety experiments. Robust dedicated tools to characterize hiPSC-CM are now required. The hiPSC-CM morphology constitutes an important parameter since these cells do not demonstrate the expected rod shape, characteristic of native human cardiomyocytes. Similarly, the presence, the density and the organization of contractile structures would be a valuable parameter to study. Precise measurements of such characteristics would be useful in many situations: for describing pathological conditions, for pharmacological screens or even for studies focused on the hiPSC-CM maturation process.
Results:
For this purpose, we developed a MATLAB based image analysis toolbox, which gives accurate values for cellular morphology parameters as well as for the contractile cell organization.
Availability And Implementation:
To demonstrate the power of this automated image analysis, we used a commercial maturation medium intended to promote the maturation status of hiPSC-CM, and compare the parameters with the ones obtained with standard culture medium, and with freshly dissociated mouse cardiomyocytes.
Supplementary Information:
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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