Biology major Rachel Fitz ’09 peered into a small, plastic terrarium housing a plump, rough-skinned amphibian about the size of a baseball.
“This is a big one,” she said as the marine toad blinked and shifted its weight. “What are we going to name him?”
Inside a Butterfield Hall lab, Fitz and her research partner, Matt Adams ’09, have been studying how toad hearts respond to simulated heart attacks.
“In order for us to study the heart, it has to be beating normally in clear view. The intermediate steps required to get to this state aren’t exactly enjoyable, but they are necessary,” said Adams, a mechanical engineering and bioengineering student. “We hope we can learn how to limit the damage a heart attack does through this research.”
A poster outside the students’ lab is a constant reminder of just how critical the desire to minimize cardiovascular damage is. According to the American Heart Association, heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States.
The toad’s heart attack was induced after its brain was clinically dead, Fitz explained as she carefully opened the toad’s underside.
Once the heart was sufficiently exposed, Fitz tapped a tiny portion of the still-functioning organ with liquid nitrogen. The nitrogen caused certain heart cells to freeze, simulating a localized heart attack.
Adams then used a small pipette to dust the heart with white and black powder. This created a speckled pattern of crucial importance to the next step of the experiment.
Gently, Adams placed the toad under a high-speed, high-tech camera that is capable of taking hundreds of pictures a second. These pictures were then fed into a computer that analyzed the changes in the speckled pattern created by the movement of the heart.
“The computer tracks the movement in order to calculate the strain on the heart,” Adams said. “We also use a pressure transducer, which is basically a little catheter that we insert into the heart to measure pressure.”
As Adams and Fitz continue this research, their sights are set beyond the hearts of the toads in their lab. Someday, the pair said, they hope their work will help protect human hearts from the devastating changes in pressure and tension caused by cardiovascular attacks.