Figure 8.

Structural integrity of excitation-contraction (EC) coupling junctions before and after VAD therapy of a myocarditis patient. (A,B) Raw confocal images of fixed isolated cardiomyocytes from pre- and post-VAD of the patient presented in Figures 6, 7, co-stained for LTCC (red), RyR (green), and JPH2 (blue) and with DAPI (not shown). (C,D) Overlay of binary images for the EC coupling proteins shown in (A,B), with magnifications of boxed regions. The cell surface, obtained from autofluorescence, is shown white, nuclei are shown white with black asterisk. Co-localizations of LTCC, JPH2, and RyR appear cyan, magenta, yellow, or white (see color legend). (E) Cardiomyocyte JPH2 cluster density (JPH2 density) of AVSD as reference and the Pre- and Post-VAD sample. (F) Fraction of LTCC clusters that were co-localized with both RyR and JPH2, as a measure of intact EC coupling junctions (n = 10/9 cells for Pre/Post-VAD). *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001, unpaired, two-tailed t-test with Holm–Bonferroni multiple-comparison correction.