Embryonic Chick Heart Muscle Cells

Abstract

Many of the early studies on cultured cardiac muscle cells were carried out using chick embryonic heart tissue. Cavanaugh’s [1] dissociation of chick embryo heart fragments into single cells using trypsin was a significant technical advancement over past procedures, which included culture of whole salamander hearts, fetal mouse hearts, and fragments of chick heart. This method of isolating heart cells later became one of the common choices for cellular dissociation. However, in recent years this trypsinization technique has been modified in various ways, according to need, as required by the nature of different types of tissues or organs used in the experiments. Harary and Farley [9] cultured trypsinized isolated neonatal rat heart cells in plastic petri dishes, showing spontaneous beating mammalian cardiac muscle cells in culture conditions. Subsequently, with the use of neonatal rat hearts, Kasten [15], Nag [25, 27] and others modified trypsinization methodology and carried out morphological and biochemical studies on these cultured cardiac muscle cells. Trypsinization technique was successfully adapted for the culture of embryonic chick heart cells, which have been used to demonstrate the morphology and growth rate pattern of cardiac muscle and nonmuscle cells [32].

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation Grant DCB-8709594