Cardiomyocyte Apoptosis in Heart Development: Methods and Protocols

Apoptosis is the process of programmed cell death that has been identified in the development of heart. It is likely to be regulated by survival and death signals that are also present in many other tissues. To understand cardiomyocyte apoptosis in normal and abnormal development of heart, the cell death detection techniques were applied to various researches. These methods include morphological, histological, or molecular assays based on recent advances in our understanding of the molecular mechanism of cell death, including: (1) terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase mediated dUTP nick end-labeling of fragmented nuclei, (2) cardiovascular molecular imaging of apoptosis using Annexin V, and (3) immunohistochemical detection of activated caspases.