Overall Research Project Description The heart is able to grow in response to exercise. This healthy growth stems from the enlargement of every heart muscle cell in the heart. Heart muscle cells grow by assembling more and more cytoskeleton, known as sarcomere in muscle cells. In the lab, we can force this growth by making cells work harder and their natural response is to build more sarcomeres. One of the proteins that is a structural member of these sarcomeres is alpha-actinin, which acts as a cross-linker to anchor other structural proteins like actin. We recently published a paper demonstrating that we can use two drugs to control the assembly and disassembly of sarcomeres. To this day, we have tracked the growth by "freezing" the cardiac muscle cells and using special dyes to look at the sarcomeres. Nevertheless, our goal is to be able to track the growth and atrophy of sarcomeres in real time from video capturing. As such, the goal of this project will be to develop an algorithm to quantify the level of growth of these sarcomeres inside the cardiac muscle cells. For that, we have acquired videos of cardiac muscle cells undergoing assembly and disassembly that will serve as examples to develop this algorithm.