The BPS Art of Science Image Contest took place again this year, during the 63rd Annual Meeting in Baltimore. The image that won second place was submitted by Natalie Weber, PhD, Medical Doctor, Postdoc Position, data gathered by Ante Radocaj, PhD, Physicist, and image created by Tim Holler, Medical Technical Assistant, all three at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, Medical School in Hannover. Weber and Holler took some time to provide information about the image and the science it represents.
What about this image made you submit it for the contest?
Currently, an important focus of our research is the study of expression levels of diverse contractile proteins in single cardiomyocytes.For relative quantification we deployed microscopy images of cardiomyocytes with immunofluorescent labeling of different, mainly sarcomeric proteins. For the Image Contest of the Biophysical Society we decided to convert our research result into art. So, the jump from protein expression to expressionism in visual arts was intuitive for our youngest team member, Tim Holler (24, lab technician), who artistically arranged some of the best images he recorded into a copy of Edvard Munch’s famous motif “The Scream”.
How did you compose this image?
The cardiomyocytes depicted in our image derive from very different origins. For example, the railing and the planks of the landing bridge are built of nicely aligned rat cardiac tissue stained against α and β-myosin. The red sky consists of human cardiac tissue cryosections stained against cardiac TroponinT, ProBNP and NKX2.5. The predominantly green and purple background is composed of human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes, again stained against α and β-myosin, as well as cardiac TroponinT. The only non-cardiomyocyte in this picture is represented in the face of the screaming figure which consists of a single fibroblast with two nuclei.
How does this image reflect your scientific research?
This composition of immunofluorescently labeled cardiomyocytes reflects the beauty and complexity of our research. Last year we attended the Art of Science Image Contest with another beautiful image of human left ventricular cardiac tissue. The picture showed a single cardiomyocyte expressing both α-myosin (fast isoform) and β-myosin (slow isoform) in close proximity to pure β-myosin expressing cardiomyocytes. Hence we asked: How can such diverse cardiomyocytes functionally coexist in the myocardial network? And that is only one of the fascinating questions in our current studies.
Can you please provide a few real-world examples of your research?
In our previously published work we were able to generate stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes with exclusively β-myosin protein by cultivating the cells on a stiff matrix for a longer time period. This enabled us to generate a cellular model for studies of the Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy, the most common genetically encoded cardiomyopathy in the world (1:500) caused by mutations frequently located in the β-myosin protein (Weber et al., 2016, doi:10.1007/s00395-016-0587-9; Iorga et al., 2017, doi: 10.3389/fphys.2017.01111).
To study functional impacts of different myosin isoforms in cardiomyocytes, we recently developed a 2-dimensional single cell mapping technique, which enabled us to interrelate functional parameters (such as twitch contractions and action potentials) to the mRNA levels (by fluorescent in-situ hybridization) and protein expression levels of α and β-myosin isoforms of the very same cardiomyocyte. This research helped us to gain more insight into the regulative mechanisms of cardiomyocyte contraction and will be presented in our new paper which is currently in the process of submission.
Do you have a website where our readers can view your recent research?
The research projects of our entire institute are presented here: Institute of Molecular and Cell Physiology, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany
Please follow our scientific work on Research Gate:
Tim Holler – author/creator of this image, IF staining and recording
Dr. Ante Radocaj - data scientist
Dr. Natalie Weber - principal investigator