Classical and novel pharmacological insights offered by the simple chick cardiomyocyte cell culture model: a valuable teaching aid and a primer for "real" research.

The chick embryo cardiomyocyte model of cell culture is a staple technique in many physiology and pharmacology laboratories. Despite the relative simplicity, robustness, and reproducibility inherent in this model, it can be used in a variety of ways to yield important new insights that help facilitate student understanding of underlying physiological and pharmacological concepts as well as, more generally, the scientific method. Using this model, this paper will show real data obtained by undergraduate students in the authors' laboratories. It will first demonstrate classical pharmacological concepts such as full and partial agonism, inverse agonism, and competitive reversible antagonism and then move on to more complex pharmacology involving the characterization of novel receptors in these cells.