Christopher Chen explains the importance of Allen Institute’s cell lines in “Cell Shorts” video
Christopher Chen, from Boston University’s Tissue Microfabrication Laboratory, used the Allen Institute’s publicly available human cell lines to study the structure that gives our heart muscle the ability to contract and pump blood. In the video below, he explains the importance of this resource and it’s relevance to the goals of CELL-MET.
“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.”
The research publication, entitled “Force Generation via β-Cardiac Myosin, Titin, and α-Actinin Drives Cardiac Sarcomere Assembly from Cell-Matrix Adhesions”, was published on January 8, 2018.