Cookies on this website

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you click 'Accept all cookies' we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies and you won't see this message again. If you click 'Reject all non-essential cookies' only necessary cookies providing core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility will be enabled. Click 'Find out more' for information on how to change your cookie settings.

Rationale: Calcium transient analysis is central to understanding inherited and acquired cardiac physiology and disease. While the development of novel calcium reporters enables assays of CRISPR/Cas-9 genome edited pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes (iPSC-CMs) and primary adult cardiomyocytes, existing calcium-detection technologies are often proprietary and require specialist equipment, while open source workflows necessitate considerable user expertise and manual input. Objective: We aimed to develop an easy to use open source, adaptable, and automated analysis pipeline for measuring cellular calcium transients, from image stack to data output, inclusive of cellular identification, background subtraction, photobleaching correction, calcium transient averaging, calcium transient fitting, data collation and aberrant behavior recognition. Methods and Results: We developed CalTrack, a MatLab based algorithm, to monitor fluorescent calcium transients in living cardiomyocytes, including isolated single cells or those contained in 3-dimensional tissues or organoids and to analyze data acquired using photomultiplier tubes or employing line scans. CalTrack uses masks to segment cells allowing multiple cardiomyocyte transients to be measured from a single field of view. After automatically correcting for photobleaching, CalTrack averages and fits a string of transients and provides parameters that measure time to peak, time of decay, tau, Fmax/F0 and others. We demonstrate the utility of CalTrack in primary and iPSC-derived cell lines in response to pharmacological compounds and in phenotyping cells carrying hypertrophic cardiomyopathy variants. Conclusions: CalTrack, an open source tool that runs on a local computer, provides automated high-throughput analysis of calcium transients in response to development, genetic or pharmacological manipulations, and pathological conditions. We expect that CalTrack analyses will accelerate insights into physiologic and abnormal calcium homeostasis that influence diverse aspects of cardiomyocyte biology.

Original publication

DOI

10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.121.318868

Type

Journal article

Journal

Circ Res

Publication Date

21/05/2021

Keywords

Calcium Cycling/Excitation-Contraction Coupling, automated analysis, basic science research, cardiomyopathy, induced plouripotent stem cells