Cellular                                           Biology

When understanding how and why Cardiomyocytes  stop proliferating after a week from birth, a lot of our studies look at the cell itself and how they interact with different drugs or how they react when they have a specific gene shut off or upregulated. 

The Cellular Biology team specializes in harvesting and culturing our primary Cardiomyocytes in order to run studies on how the Molecular Biology projects affect and express within the cell. These projects involve plate based cultures of cells which allows for control of how we view the cell, whether that be in a monolayer or individualized cells.

Our team also heavily relies on differing microscopy methods; Digital Holography and Fluorescence Microscopy are two of the main ways we image our cells. Digital Holography uses a low light laser in order to capture both still images and live recordings of cells on a 3D plane. This allows us to be able to view the cells from all angles as well as be able to track individual cells. Fluorescence Microscopy on the other hand uses different color filters that excite fluorophores that are incorporated into the cells through immunohistochemistry (antibodies) and chemical staining (click chemistry). This allows for us to view different parts of the cell through the different colors it glows.

Similar to the Sectioning team, we also learn skills in image analysis with Fiji ImageJ, which is used to determine how effective a treatment is or how cells are acting.