Streamline your research workflow with Ready-To-Use, high quality cryopreserved neonatal rat ventricular cardiomyocytes. No more animal handling, tissue preparation and waste of time. Simply thaw and use, or store in liquid nitrogen for experimentation at your convenience.

These primary cardiomyocytes are dissected and isolated in the native state from the ventricles of Sprague Dawley rats (Postnatal day 1-2). The pooled ventricular cardiomyocytes are purified by double panning to minimize fibroblasts. Guaranteed high quality, each batch of cells is sampled for morphological and functional testing following conditions that mimic shipping.

Get your results fast. These high quality cryopreserved cardiomyocytes are prepared in ampoules of 4 million ventricular cardiomyocytes and have the added advantage of being guaranteed mycoplasm/bacteria free. When thawed and cultured you will obtain >80% viability, with excellent morphology and connectivity, and cells will display beating at 24hr in culture. At this time, fibroblasts are approximately 10%.

Culture conditions have been optimized and protocols are provided with the cells. The recommended plating density yields 10 wells of a 24 well plate or 50 wells of a 96 well plate.

The availability of batch-tested cryopreserved ventricular cardiomyocytes afford the researcher minimal inter-run variability and a significant advantage for reproducibility across time. Tested extensively in our laboratories for up to 36 days in culture, these cryopreserved neonatal rat ventricular cardiomyocytes form functional syncytium with excellent connectivity and connexin expression (see Fig 1). The ventricular cardiomyocytes display electrical activity and responsiveness to drug treatment (see Fig 2) characteristic of freshly dissociated cardiomyocytes in culture.

Fig 1.

Primary rat cardiomyocytes in culture are widely used for cardiac research in vitro. In healthy culture, the isolated cardiomyocytes establish cell-cell contacts, forming a two-dimensional syncytium of synchronously beating cells. This syncytium can be seen in the low (micrograph A) and high magnification (micrograph B) images of cryopreserved neonatal rat ventricular myocytes thawed and cultured 13 days. The typical actin bands can be seen stained with anti-actinin (green). The cell-cell contacts depend upon expression of the gap junction protein connexin-43 which can be easily seen in micrograph C of a culture immunostained with anti-connexin 43 (red). Cell nuclei are shown in blue.

Fig 2.

Example Multi Electrode Array (MEA-Multichannel Systems) recording of electrical activity from cryopreserved neonatal rat cardiomyocytes thawed and cultured 8 days. These cardiomyocytes typically showed connectivity (syncytium) and beating within 24hr in culture. The tracings are from 4 of the 64 recording points, showing A. baseline activity B. activity in the presence of Isoproterenol (10µM) C. recovery of activity following drug washout.