In Vivo Imaging of Transduction Efficiencies of Cardiac Targeting Peptide

Since the initial description of protein transduction domains, also known as cell penetrating peptides, over 25 years ago, there has been intense interest in developing these peptides, especially cell-specific ones, as novel vectors for delivering diagnostic and therapeutic materials. Our past work involving phage display identified a novel, nonnaturally occurring, 12 amino acid-long peptide that we named cardiac targeting peptide (CTP) due to its ability to transduce normal heart tissue in vivo with peak uptake seen in as little as 15 min after an intravenous injection. We have undertaken detailed biodistribution studies by injecting CTP labeled with fluorophore cyanine5.5, allowing it to circulate for various periods of time, and euthanizing, fixing, and sectioning multiple organs followed by fluorescent microscopy imaging. In this publication, we describe these processes as well as ex vivo imaging of harvested organs using an in vivo imaging system in detail. We provide detailed methodologies and practices for undertaking transduction as well as biodistribution studies using CTP as an example.