Ex-vivo characterization of Drosophila heart functional parameters

Abstract

Investigation of cardiac phenotypes in Drosophila is a relatively new field. Its biomedical interest stems from the strong conservation of genes involved in heart development and physiology thus making the fly an appropriate model to investigate disease pathways and drug testing. Drosophila heart is tubular and critical parameters like heart beat rate, systole and diastole diameters, fractional shortening, and arrhythmicity index, among others, can be derived from high-speed video recordings of dissected hearts. Here, we provide detailed protocols for Drosophila heart dissection and processing, as well as potential downstream applications such as in situ hybridization, immunofluorescence, and molecular biology methods to extract RNA and proteins. We have applied these methods to characterize cardiac phenotypes in a myotonic dystrophy fly model.