Abstract 15280: Comparisons of Action Potentials and Ionic Currents Between Neonatal Rat Ventricular Myocytes and Adult Zebrafish Ventricular Myocytes

Abstract

Introduction: Zebrafish heart is established as a model to investigate cardiac electrical abnormalities. However, electrical properties of adult zebrafish cardiomyocytes are not sufficiently characterized. Hypothesis: In this study, by comparing the electrical properties between neonatal rat ventricular myocytes (NRVMs) and adult zebrafish ventricular myocytes (AZVMs), we intended to characterize the action potential (AP), action current (AC) and the properties of Na + current ( I Na ) in AZVMs. Methods: We used patch-clamp technique to characterize the electrical properties, including AP, AC and I Na , in cultured NRVMs and freshly isolated AZVMs. Results: NVRMs showed larger AP amplitude (119±6 vs. 79±4mV, p<.05) but shorter AP duration (APD 90 , 136±11 vs. 213±19 ms, p<.05) than those of AZVMs. The AP duration exhibited marked frequency-dependent alterations in AZVMs. Under the slow pacing rate, early after-depolarizations (EAD) emerged under slow pacing rate with 0.05 Hz. In cell-attached voltage-clamp recordings made from AZVMs, ACs could be elicited by +10 mV steps. As the depolarization step increased to +70 mV, the latency for appearance of ACs was progressively reduced from >123 ms to 9.8 ms. The presence of spontaneous ACs was monitored in spontaneously beating NRVMs and AZVMs. The AC amplitude in NRVMs was larger compared to that in AZVMs (17.3±2.1 vs. 11.6±1.1 pA, p<.05), although firing frequency of AC in NRVMs is higher than in AZVMs (1.13±0.09 vs. 0.38±0.03 Hz, p<.05). The lowering effect of ranolazine, a I Na antagonist, on firing frequency was significantly larger in NRVMs (1.13±0.09 to 0.31±0.02 Hz, p<.05) than in AZVMs (0.38±0.03 to 0.27±0.02 Hz). There was a hyperpolarizing shift of peak I Na in AZVM compared to NRVM. Conclusions: Our results demonstrated major differences in the cellular electrical behavior between AZVMs and NRVMs.