TY - JOUR T1 - OptoDyCE: Automated System for High-Throughput All-Optical Dynamic Cardiac Electrophysiology JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/023572 SP - 023572 AU - Aleksandra Klimas AU - Jinzhu Yu AU - Christina M. Ambrosi AU - John C. Williams AU - Harold Bien AU - Emilia Entcheva Y1 - 2015/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/07/31/023572.abstract N2 - The improvement of preclinical cardiotoxicity testing, the discovery of new ion-channel-targeted drugs, and the phenotyping and use of stem-cell-derived cardiomyocytes and other biologics all necessitate high-throughput (HT), cellular-level electrophysiological interrogation tools. Optical techniques for actuation and sensing provide instant parallelism, enabling contactless dynamic HT testing of cells and small-tissue constructs, not affordable by other means. Here, we consider, computationally and experimentally, the limits of all-optical electrophysiology when applied to drug testing, then implement and validate OptoDyCE, a fully automated system for all-optical cardiac electrophysiology. We validate optical actuation by virally introducing optogenetic drivers in (rat and human) cardiomyocytes or through the modular use of dedicated light-sensitive somatic “spark” cells. We show that this automated all-optical approach provides high-throughput means of cellular interrogation, i.e. allows for dynamic testing of >600 multicellular samples or compounds per hour, and yields high-content information about the action of a drug over time, space and doses. ER -