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영어

Glycosylation is essential for proper cell signaling and embryonic development. Changes in glycosylation are often a hallmark of disease states. Cardiovascular disease has become one of the top causes of death. Many studies using rat models have related heart diseases and regulations of heart physiological functions to altered glycosylations. However, the dynamic regulation and molecular mechanism of glycosylation in heart are not clear. Rat is an important model organism for human cardiovascular disease studies. Isolated intact rat hearts are often used in physiological and pathological studies. In situ imaging biomolecules in intact heart avoid possible damage of myocyte and biased loss of cardiac myocytes during enzymatic isolation. Here, we applied the metabolic glycan labeling technique for imaging sialylation and O-linked glycosylation in living cardiomyocytes and intact rat hearts. The effects of unnatural sugars on the function of cardiomyocytes and hearts were evaluated. We found unnatural sugars did not perturb the function of cardiomyocytes and hearts. Glycan imaging revealed an interesting distribution pattern: sialic acid or O- linked glycan enriched at intercalated discs of adult rat cardiomyocytes. We also observed that the glycosylations of cardiomyocytes were altered in isoproterenol-induced cardiac hypertrophy rat models. This work extends the application of metabolic glycan labeling technique to probe glycosylations in rats and provides the first example of using this technique for in situ cellular glycans imaging in mammalian model organisms. The biological significance of altered glycosylations in cardiac hypertrophy heart is under investigation in our lab.