A fully-automated low-cost cardiac monolayer optical mapping robot.

Area of Science:

• Cardiovascular Research
• Biomedical Engineering
• Drug Discovery

Background:

• Scalable electrophysiological measurement systems are crucial for advancing cardiac disease research and drug development.
• Optical mapping offers high spatiotemporal resolution for key electrophysiological parameters like action potentials and calcium dynamics.
• Cardiac monolayers are scalable and suitable for high-throughput interrogation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a scalable, automated monolayer optical mapping robot for high-throughput analysis.
• To demonstrate the system's capability in parallelized macroscopic optical mapping of cardiac cell models.
• To showcase the system's versatility for both neonatal rat ventricular myocytes and human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes.

Main Methods:

• Development of a fully-automated, cost-effective monolayer optical mapping robot.
• Parallelized macroscopic optical mapping of calcium dynamics in neonatal rat ventricular myocyte monolayers.
• Parallelized macroscopic optical mapping of voltage dynamics in human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocyte monolayers using genetically encoded and voltage-sensitive dyes.

Main Results:

• Successful validation of a scalable and automated monolayer optical mapping system.
• Demonstrated parallelized optical mapping of calcium dynamics in neonatal rat ventricular myocyte monolayers.
• Showcased versatile application for voltage dynamics in human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocyte monolayers.

Conclusions:

• The automated monolayer optical mapping robot provides a scalable and efficient platform for high-throughput cardiac electrophysiology.
• This system accelerates drug development and cardiac disease research by enabling rapid interrogation of cardiac cell models.
• The demonstrated versatility supports applications in regenerative and personalized medicine.