Analysis of Rab1 function in cardiomyocyte growth.

Protein transport between intracellular organelles is coordinated by Rab GTPases. As an initial approach to defining the function of Rab GTPases in cardiomyocytes, our laboratory focused on Rab1, which regulates protein transport specifically from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) to the Golgi apparatus. Our studies have demonstrated that adenovirus-driven expression of Rab1 promotes cell growth of primary cultures of neonatal cardiomyocytes in vitro and that transgenic expression of Rab1 in the myocardium induces cardiac hypertrophy in mouse hearts in vivo. These data provide strong evidence implicating that ER-to-Golgi protein transport functions as a regulatory site for control of cardiomyocyte growth. Here we describe a sets of methods used in our laboratory to characterize the function of Rab1 GTPase in modulating cardiac myocyte growth.