Isolation and Cultivation of Adult Rat Cardiomyocytes

The overall goal of this experiment is to isolate and cultivate adult rat cardiomyocytes, which can be used in various experiments to understand their biological and pathophysiological behavior. This method can help answer key questions in the field of biology and pathophysiology of the heart, such as cardiac dedifferentiation, cardiac hypertension, or heart failure. The main advantage of this technique is that adult cardiomyocytes can be investigated individually without the influence of adjacent cells, such as fibroblasts or endothelial cells.

The implications of this technique extend toward pathophysiological understanding of heart diseases because adult cardiac myocytes can be investigated individually. Though this method can provide insight into the behavior of adult rat cardiomyocytes, it can also be applied to other models, such as ischemia reperfusion models, spontaneously hypertensive rats, or other species. The Langendorff perfusion system consists of a long, double-walled glass tube with a glass funnel at the top and the bottom of the tube.