title: Intervention of cardiomyocyte death based on real-time monitoring of cell adhesion through impedance sensing.
abstract: Cardiomyocyte death caused by proinflammatory cytokines, such as Tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha), is one of the hot topics in cardiovascular research. TNF-alpha can induce multiple cell processes that are dependent on the treatment time although the long-term treatment definitely leads to cell death. The ability to intervene in cell death will be invaluable to reveal the effects of short-term TNF-alpha treatment to cardiomyocytes. However, a real-time monitoring technique is needed to guide the intervention of cell responses. In this work, we employed the impedance-sensing technique to real-time monitor the equivalent cell-substrate distance of cardiomyocytes via electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and electrical cell-substrate impedance sensing (ECIS). In the stabilized cardiomyocyte culture, the sustained TNF-alpha treatment caused strengthened cell adhesion in the first 2 h which was followed by the transition to cell detachment afterwards. Considering cell detachment was an early morphological evidence of cell death, we removed TNF-alpha from the cardiomyocyte culture before the transition to achieve the intervention of cell responses. The result of this intervention showed that cell adhesion was continuously strengthened before and after the removal of TNF-alpha, indicating the short-term treated cardiomyocytes did not undergo death processes. It was also demonstrated in TUNEL and TBE tests that the percentages of apoptosis and cell death were both lowered.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Microsystems Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, United States.
authors.forename: Yiling
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Qiu
authors.forename: Ronglih
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Liao
authors.forename: Xin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D015374:Biosensing Techniques / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods; D002448:Cell Adhesion; D018929:Cell Culture Techniques; D016923:Cell Death; D017097:Electric Impedance; D004867:Equipment Design; D008297:Male; D032383:Myocytes, Cardiac / Q000166:cytology*; D051381:Rats; D017208:Rats, Wistar; D013057:Spectrum Analysis / Q000379:methods; D014409:Tumor Necrosis Factor-alpha / Q000378:metabolism*
chemical_list: D014409:Tumor Necrosis Factor-alpha