“We are really interested in trying to take cells that are cardiomyocytes and get them to organize into a cardiac muscle tissue,” says Chen. “Recently, we’ve been trying to understand how the sarcomeres are formed because there are many situations where it appears that in disease settings those sarcomere structures are abnormally formed. The Allen Institute cell lines were critical for our study because they have cell lines where different proteins are labeled to allow us to track which proteins are where.”