In a recent study, arsenic exposure was related to an increase in left ventricular (LV) wall thickness and LV hypertrophy in young American Indians with low burden of cardiovascular risk factors 5. Contamination of drinking water is considered one of the top global health concerns, given the extent of population’s potential exposure and its association with several diseases, including diabetes, reproductive impairment, cancers and cardiac diseases 3, 4. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that over 200 million people worldwide are chronically exposed to arsenic through drinking water at concentrations above the WHO safety standard of 10 μg/L 2. One of the most diffused toxicants is arsenic, a metalloid element with ubiquitous distribution in the earth's crust, groundwater and biosphere 1. These results provide new insights into the role of arsenic in impairing cytoskeletal components of perinatal-like cardiomyocytes which, in turn, affect cell size, shape and beating capacity.Ĭhronic exposure to environmental pollutants can affect human health. Also, significant increase of Cx40, Cx43 and Cx45 connexin genes and of Cx43 protein expression profiles is paralleled by large Cx43 immunofluorescence signals.
Sarcomere organization and cell morphology impairment are paralleled by differential expression of sarcomeric α-actin and Tropomyosin proteins and of acta2, myh6 and myh7 genes. With this approach, we quantified alterations to the (a) beating activity (b) sarcomere organization (texture, edge, repetitiveness, height and width of the Z bands) (c) cardiomyocyte size and shape (d) volume occupied by cardiomyocytes within the EBs. Here, bioinformatic image-analysis tools were coupled with cellular and molecular analyses to obtain functional and structural quantitative metrics of the impairment induced by 0.1, 0.5 or 1.0 µM arsenic trioxide exposure on the perinatal-like cardiomyocyte component of mouse embryoid bodies, within their 3D complex cell organization. Poorly known are its effects on perinatal cardiomyocytes. Arsenic, a world-wide diffused toxicant, is associated to cardiac pathology in the adult and to congenital heart defects in the foetus. Chronic exposure to environmental pollutants threatens human health.
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