Compartmentation of cGMP Signaling in Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Derived Cardiomyocytes during Prolonged Culture.

The therapeutic benefit of stimulating the cGMP pathway as a form of treatment to combat heart failure, as well as other fibrotic pathologies, has become well established. However, the development and signal compartmentation of this crucial pathway has so far been overlooked. We studied how the three main cGMP pathways, namely, nitric oxide (NO)-cGMP, natriuretic peptide (NP)-cGMP, and ß3-adrenoreceptor (AR)-cGMP, mature over time in culture during cardiomyocyte differentiation from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC-CMs). After introducing a cGMP sensor for Förster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) microscopy, we used selective phosphodiesterase (PDE) inhibition to reveal cGMP signal compartmentation in hPSC-CMs at various times of culture. Methyl-ß-cyclodextrin was employed to remove cholesterol and thus to destroy caveolae in these cells, where physical cGMP signaling compartmentalization is known to occur in adult cardiomyocytes. We identified PDE3 as regulator of both the NO-cGMP and NP-cGMP pathway in the early stages of culture. At the late stage, the role of the NO-cGMP pathway diminished, and it was predominantly regulated by PDE1, PDE2, and PDE5. The NP-cGMP pathway shows unrestricted locally and unregulated cGMP signaling. Lastly, we observed that maturation of the ß3-AR-cGMP pathway in prolonged cultures of hPSC-CMs depends on the accumulation of caveolae. Overall, this study highlighted the importance of structural development for the necessary compartmentation of the cGMP pathway in maturing hPSC-CMs.

MultiFRET: A Detailed Protocol for High-Throughput Multiplexed Ratiometric FRET.

The newly generated software plugin MultiFRET allows for real-time measurements of multiplexed fluorescent biosensors in a near high-throughput fashion. Here we describe a detailed protocol for setup and use of this software for any purpose requiring instant feedback during fluorescence measurement experiments. We further describe its non-primary features including beam splitter misalignment correction, custom calculations through input of simple equations typed in a .txt format, customizable Excel output, and offline bulk analysis of image stacks. Finally, we supply a usage example of a cAMP measurement in cultured rat neonatal cardiomyocytes.

A Software Tool for High-Throughput Real-Time Measurement of Intensity-Based Ratio-Metric FRET.

Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) is increasingly used for non-invasive measurement of fluorescently tagged molecules in live cells. In this study, we have developed a freely available software tool MultiFRET, which, together with the use of a motorised microscope stage, allows multiple single cells to be studied in one experiment. MultiFRET is a Java plugin for Micro-Manager software, which provides real-time calculations of ratio-metric signals during acquisition and can simultaneously record from multiple cells in the same experiment. It can also make other custom-determined live calculations that can be easily exported to Excel at the end of the experiment. It is flexible and can work with multiple spectral acquisition channels. We validated this software by comparing the output of MultiFRET to that of a previously established and well-documented method for live ratio-metric FRET experiments and found no significant difference between the data produced with the use of the new MultiFRET and other methods. In this validation, we used several cAMP FRET sensors and cell models: i) isolated adult cardiomyocytes from transgenic mice expressing the cytosolic epac1-camps and targeted pmEpac1 and Epac1-PLN sensors, ii) isolated neonatal mouse cardiomyocytes transfected with the AKAP79-CUTie sensor, and iii) human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CM) transfected with the Epac-SH74 sensor. The MultiFRET plugin is an open source freely available package that can be used in a wide area of live cell imaging when live ratio-metric calculations are required.