The role of stretch, tachycardia and sodium-calcium exchanger in induction of early cardiac remodeling

Accute stretch and tachycardia are capable of inducing pathological excitation transcription coupling - an early invent before structural cardiac remodeling which transitions to heart failure. The sodium calcium exchanger is a key player in maintaining calcium homeostasis and is implicated in pathological signaling during heart failure. Neonatal rat ventricular cardiomyocytes (NRVCM) were subjected to mechanical stress and high freqency elecrical stimulation to study genes regulated during the early phase of trigger induced cardiac remodeling. Inhibition of the sodium calcium exchanger was used in an attempt to supress the early remodeling process and gain insight into the pathological signaling pathway. Samples subjected to stretch, tachycardia, their respective controls and an NCX inhibitor - KB-R7934 treated samples under the mentioned conditions (4 groups, 3 biological replicates per group) were used for RNA extraction and microarray hybridisation on the Affymetrix gene chip. Tecnical replicates from the same isolation were pooled together on each chip.