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. 2014 Jul 23;34(10):1688–1694. doi: 10.1038/jcbfm.2014.134

Figure 4.

Figure 4

Morphometric and suppression of canonical transforming growth factor (TGF)-beta signaling changes in alk1 knockdown zebrafish are corrected with losartan treatment. (A) 4 dpf zebrafish were analyzed for whole organism morphometric changes (the cranial–caudal angle) as a surrogate for pertubations in hemodynamics between groups. (B) In uninjected organisms, the cranial–caudal angle was measured to be 176.0±0.6488 degrees, (C) whereas it was significantly more acute in the morphant-control group 97.50±4.987, P<0.0001. Morphant organisms frequently showed systemic evidence of high-output cardiac failure, including pericardial edema (star). (D, E) Treatment with losartan increased the cranial–caudal angle to 160±3.38, which was greater than the morphant-control group, P<0.0001. (F) The InstantOne ELISA kit (eBioscience) was used to measure levels of phosphorylated SMAD1 (Ser463/465) in whole embryo lysates. Absorbance in morphant-control group was significantly decreased compared with uninjected organisms (0.189±0.0201, 0.429±0.0164, P=0.0002). After treatment with losartan, morphant levels approached uninjected levels (0.326±0.0360, P=0.0355) and was significantly higher than the morphant-control group (P=0.0294).