Intracellular Calcium Dynamics in Primary Human Adrenocortical Cells Deciphered with a Novel Pipeline

Abstract

Introduction The fluctuations of the intracellular Ca 2+ concentration ([Ca 2+ ] i ) are key physiological signals for cell function under normal conditions and can undergo profound alterations in disease states, as high blood pressure due to endocrine disorders like primary aldosteronism (PA). However, when assessing such fluctuations several parameters in the Ca 2+ signal dynamics need to be considered, which renders their assessment challenging. Aim Aim to develop an observer-independent custom-made pipeline to analyze Ca 2 + dynamics in terms of frequency and peak parameters, as amplitude, full width at half maximum (FWHM) and area under the curve (AUC). Methods We applied a custom-made methodology to aldosterone-producing adenoma (APA) and APA adjacent cells (AAC) and found this pipeline to be suitable for monitoring and processing a wide-range of [Ca 2+ ] i events in these cell types delivering reproducible results. Conclusion The designed pipeline can provide a useful tool for [Ca 2+ ] i signal analysis that allows comparisons of Ca 2+ dynamics not only in PA, but in other cell phenotypes that are relevant for the regulation of blood pressure. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40292-024-00641-5.