Question: How did you create beating heart tissue in a lab ?

Tatiana Trantidou answered on 19 Jun 2015:

To make my experiments, in the lab we have to dissect rat pups and take cells from their heart. But because these are pups, their heart cells are not fully developed. So when you put these on a plain glass surface, they will be randomly sitting everywhere not being connected with each other, some of them might be beating by themselves, some others won’t be beating at all. This is nothing like what happens when these cells are actually in the heart of the animal. There, all heart cells sit parallel to each other and connect with each other. Think about it as a parallel set of strings one next to each other. If they remain connected and close to each other, they can beat altogether.
In the lab I take a glass surface and put on top a very thin film (something like a cling film). This film doesn’t like water and so the cells do not like it (they prefer to sit on surfaces that love water). Then, I change the chemistry of some areas of this film and make them love water, I can literally make any pattern of water-hating water-loving areas. I throw the food of the cells on top, the food gathers on the water-loving areas. Then I throw the cells randomly on top, and they self-gather on top of the food. Depending on the pattern I create, I can make them sit next to each other, inside circles, in diamond-shaped areas and so on. If I make them sit parallel next to each other, they are happy and once one cell starts beating, it sends the beating signal to the others and they beat too.