Biophysical Society Thematic Meeting - June 28-July 1, 2015

New Biological Frontiers Illuminated by Molecular Sensors and Actuators

Monday Speaker Abstracts

Multidisciplinary Optical Approach to Zebrafish Targeting Cardiovascular Research Ian Liau . National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. Relative to other common model animals, the zebrafish (Danio rerio) possesses numerous unique features such as rapid development, genetic tractability, low cost of maintenance and optical transparency at the larval stage. The underlying function and gene of its cardiovascular system is similar to that of human beings, further making it particularly attractive for fundamental study or for drug screen targeting cardiovascular diseases. Toward this end, we have developed multidisciplinary optical approaches to assess the cardiovascular function of zebrafish. With pseudodynamic 3D imaging, we determined precisely the cardiac function of zebrafish. We show that the conventional 2D approach tends to overestimate the cardiac parameters and to produce results of greater variation. As demonstration, we characterized zebrafish subject to pharmacological interventions of varied cardiac activities and evaluated a zebrafish model of cardiomyopathy. We found that the cardiac function of zebrafish exhibits pharmacological responses similar to human beings. With image-guided Raman micro-spectroscopy, we interrogated the pharmacological response of hypercholesterolemia zebrafish subject to two commonly prescribed anti-hyperlipidemic drugs (ezetimibe and atorvastatin) in situ and in vivo. While the treatment of either drug alone decreased the vascular deposition of lipids, only atorvastatin exerted a profound anti-oxidative effect on vascular fatty lesions. Beyond its efficacies in suppressing both the accumulation and oxidation of vascular lipids, atorvastatin expedited the clearance of vascular lipids. The pleotropic therapeutic effect of atorvastatin observed on zebrafish is notably consistent with the known pharmaceutical effects of this drug on human beings. In view of the growing interest of using zebrafish in both fundamental and applied cardiovascular research, we envisage that multidisciplinary optical approach should benefit fields ranging from investigation of the pathophysiology of cardiovascular diseases to a pharmaceutical evaluation of cardiac activity and toxicity.

Imaging Subcellular Voltage Dynamics in Vivo with Improved Genetically Encoded Indicators Francois St-Pierre , Helen H. Yang, Xiaozhe Ding, Ying Yang, Thomas R. Clandinin, Michael Z. Lin. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. See Abstract: Pos-41 Board 41

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