PUBLICATION

A novel wireless ECG system for prolonged monitoring of multiple zebrafish for heart disease and drug screening studies

Authors
Le, T., Zhang, J., Nguyen, A.H., Trigo Torres, R.S., Vo, K., Dutt, N., Lee, J., Ding, Y., Xu, X., Lau, M.P.H., Cao, H.
ID
ZDB-PUB-211123-7
Date
2021
Source
Biosensors & bioelectronics   197: 113808 (Journal)
Registered Authors
Cao, Hung, Ding, Yonghe, Xu, Xiaolei
Keywords
Cardiac disease, Drug screening, Electrocardiogram (ECG), Prolonged anesthesia, Zebrafish
MeSH Terms
  • Animals
  • Biosensing Techniques*
  • Drug Evaluation, Preclinical
  • Electrocardiography
  • Heart Diseases*
  • Zebrafish
PubMed
34801796 Full text @ Biosens. Bioelectron.
Abstract
Zebrafish and their mutant lines have been extensively used in cardiovascular studies. In the current study, the novel system, Zebra II, is presented for prolonged electrocardiogram (ECG) acquisition and analysis for multiple zebrafish within controllable working environments. The Zebra II is composed of a perfusion system, apparatuses, sensors, and an in-house electronic system. First, the Zebra II is validated in comparison with a benchmark system, namely iWORX, through various experiments. The validation displayed comparable results in terms of data quality and ECG changes in response to drug treatment. The effects of anesthetic drugs and temperature variation on zebrafish ECG were subsequently investigated in experiments that need real-time data assessment. The Zebra II's capability of continuous anesthetic administration enabled prolonged ECG acquisition up to 1 h compared to that of 5 min in existing systems. The novel, cloud-based, automated analysis with data obtained from four fish further provided a useful solution for combinatorial experiments and helped save significant time and effort. The system showed robust ECG acquisition and analytics for various applications including arrhythmia in sodium induced sinus arrest, temperature-induced heart rate variation, and drug-induced arrhythmia in Tg(SCN5A-D1275N) mutant and wildtype fish. The multiple channel acquisition also enabled the implementation of randomized controlled trials on zebrafish models. The developed ECG system holds promise and solves current drawbacks in order to greatly accelerate drug screening applications and other cardiovascular studies using zebrafish.
Genes / Markers
Figures
Expression
Phenotype
Mutations / Transgenics
Human Disease / Model
Sequence Targeting Reagents
Fish
Antibodies
Orthology
Engineered Foreign Genes
Mapping