Classic studies of cultured cardiac myocyte hypertrophy: Interview with a transformer

摘要

Cardiac Hypertrophy 101: At my institution, I teach a course entitled The Molecular Basis of Heart Disease. Among the topics covered in the course is the cellular and molecular basis of pathological cardiac hypertrophy and heart failure. The reading list for the course includes many of what I believe to be classic articles on cardiac myocyte growth. Among the articles that have strongly influenced our understanding of the cellular and molecular basis of the pathology are 3 that were published by Dr Paul Simpson in Circulation Research in 1982 and 1985.I became aware of these articles when they were published because my laboratory was examining the secretion of endocrine and paracrine factors by the heart, and our focus was on the peptide hormone, atrial natriuretic factor. In part, our studies required that we prepare separate cultures of rat atrial and ventricular myocytes, and that we maintain them in serum-free medium to test the effects of various adrenergic agonists on atrial natriuretic factor expression, post-translational processing, and secretion. Thankfully, the articles of Paul Simpson described with clarity and completeness how to not only isolate neonatal rat ventricular myocytes, but also how to maintain them in serum-free medium. Perhaps most remarkable to those of us studying mechanisms of cardiac myocyte function was the description of the growth effects of adrenergic agonists on cultured cardiac myocytes.