Functional characterization of developing heart in embryos using Electric Potential Sensors

The characterization of the electrocardiographic activity of the living zebrafish heart during early developmental stages is a challenging task. Most of the available techniques are limited to heartbeat rate quantification being this inaccurate. Other invasive methodologies require the insertion of electrodes noise isolated environments and advanced amplification stages making these techniques very expensive. In this paper, we present a novel and non-invasive sensor development to characterize the functional activity of the developing heart of in vivo zebrafish embryos. The design is based on the Electric Potential Sensing technology patented at Sussex which has been developed to achieve reproducibility and continuous detection. We present preliminary functional characterization data of the developing zebrafish heart starting at 3 days-post-fertilization. Results show that using the proposed system for mapping the electrocardiographic activity of the zebrafish heart at early developmental stages is successfully accomplished. This is the first time that such a sensitive sensor has been developed for measuring the electrical changes occurring on micron sized (< 100 µm) living samples such as the zebrafish heart.