We used a Fotonic Sensor™, a fiber optic displacement measurement instrument, to measure the chronotropy and the contractility of cultured neonatal rat cardiac myocytes. The principle of the measurement is to detect changes in the distance between the probe and myocytes vertically extruded by the contraction. A fiber optic probe consists of adjacent pairs of light-transmitting and light-receiving fibers. The ratio of reflected light to transmitted light changes proportionally to the distance between the probe and an object at a certain range shown in a calibration curve. The analogue output from the sensor was transferred to a personal computer through an analogue/digital converter and analyzed. The sensor was able to detect the rate of myocyte beating, i.e., chronotropy, with a high correlation to the frequency of electrically stimulated beating and agreed well with the beating rate counted visually under a microscope. The contractility was evaluated by the maximum contraction velocity (Vm) by the first derivatives of the contraction curves obtained by the sensor. Norepinephrine (NE) and isoproterenol (ISO) increased the contractility in cultured myocytes in a dose-dependent fashion. In the preparation of rat ventricular papillary muscle, NE- and ISO-induced increase in the Vm in the radial direction significantly correlated with the increase in tension measured with a force-displacement transducer. These results indicate that the Fotonic Sensor™ is an appropriate instrument for evaluating the chronotropy and the contractility of cultured myocytes.
