Models and methods -- fly research related to heart disease

Bell KM, Kronert WA, Huang A, Bernstein SI, Swank DM. The R249Q hypertrophic cardiomyopathy myosin mutation decreases contractility in Drosophila by impeding force production. J Physiol. 2019 Apr 4. doi: 10.1113/JP277333. PMID: 30950055.

From the abstract: "... Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a genetic disease that causes thickening of the heart's ventricular walls and is a leading cause of sudden cardiac death. HCM is caused by missense mutations in muscle proteins including myosin ... We investigated the disease mechanism for HCM myosin mutation R249Q by expressing it in the indirect flight muscle of Drosophila melanogaster and measuring alterations to muscle and flight performance. Muscle mechanical analysis revealed R249Q decreased muscle power production due to slower muscle kinetics and decreased force production; force production was reduced because fewer mutant myosin cross-bridges were bound simultaneously to actin. ... Overall, our results do not support the increased contractility hypothesis. Instead, our results suggest the ventricular hypertrophy for human R249Q mutation is a compensatory response to decreases in heart muscle power output."

Lee CY, Wang HJ, Jhang JD, Cho IC. Automated drosophila heartbeat counting based on image segmentation technique on optical coherence tomography. Sci Rep. 2019 Apr 3;9(1):5557. PMID: 30944361; PMCID: PMC6447591.

From the abstract: "... studies on drosophila cardiac have improved our understanding of human cardiovascular disease. Drosophila cardiac consist of five circular chambers: a conical chamber (CC) and four ostia sections (O1-O4). ... An automated drosophila heartbeat counting algorithm based on the chamber segmentation is developed for OCT in this study. This algorithm has two parts: automated chamber segmentation and heartbeat counting. In addition, this study proposes a principal components analysis (PCA)-based supervised learning method for training the chamber contours to make chamber segmentation more accurate. ... The average calculated heart rates of two-week and six-week drosophila were about 4.77 beats/s and 4.73 beats/s, respectively, which was consistent with the results of manual counting."