Cardiac arrhythmias are common and one of the current major healthcare challenges since they affect millions of people worldwide. Arrhythmias are associated with high morbidity and mortality1,2 and represent the underlying cause for the majority of sudden cardiac deaths3. Up to date treatment options have improved patient survival but are still mainly symptomatic treatments rather than targeting the underlying mechanisms. Thus, these treatments have limited efficacy and may frequently cause severe side effects4,5,6. An improvement of current treatment options requires insight into the underlying pathophysiology, creating the need for suitable models to study. Small animal models - and specifically mouse models - play a crucial role in arrhythmia research as they allow to study key mechanisms of arrhythmogenesis, for example the genetic impact on cellular electrophysiology, ion channel function or calcium handling7,8.
For this purpose, isolated atrial and ventricular cardiomyocytes of sufficient quantity and viability are required. A broad spectrum of different isolation approaches to obtain atrial and ventricular myocytes has been previously described9,10,11,12,13 and some groups have presented data from simultaneous measurements of L-type current and calcium current induced calcium transients from either atrial14 or ventricular15 murine cardiomyocytes. However, to our best knowledge there is no data available of atrial as well as ventricular measurements from one animal. Researchers focus on a broad variety of topics ranging from electrophysiology to proteomics, functional studies as cell contractility or protein interactions, mitochondrial function, or genetics – all in need of isolated cardiomyocytes. Many of the published protocols thus have not been specifically developed for patch clamp studies, leading to limited yields and insufficient cell quality for patch clamp studies. Thus, simultaneous patch clamp and calcium transient measurements of atrial and ventricular cells isolated from one animal cannot be performed with established protocols.
Isolation of murine – especially atrial – myocytes for patch clamp experiments remains challenging. This article provides a simple and fast method for the isolation of high-quality murine atrial and ventricular myocytes via retrograde enzyme based Langendorff perfusion, which subsequently allows simultaneous measurements of both net membrane current and current induced calcium transients from one animal. This article elaborates a protocol for the isolation of atrial and ventricular myocytes derived from wild type mice and mice carrying genetic mutations. This protocol can be used for male and female mice alike. The myocyte isolation, images, and representative results described below were obtained from wild type C57Bl/6 mice at the age of 6 (± 1) months. Nevertheless, this protocol has successfully been used for mice at various ages ranging from 2 to 24 months with different genotypes. Figure 1 shows the isolation setup and a close-up of a cannulated heart during enzyme perfusion.