Mechanical synchronization of active beating within and between cardiomyocytes

Abstract eng:
We present theoretical models and predictions of how mechanics due to elastic interactions in actively beating heart cells can lead to synchronization of beating both within single cells and between nearby cells. Our research is motivated by recent experiments that show a correlation between the registry of adjacent muscle fibers and the beating strain of a single, embryonic cardiomyocyte and others that show how ... of a nearby heart cell. The theory is generic and analytical in nature and focuses on the role of elastically mediated interactions of oscillating, active force dipoles in these cells. For the single cell, the theory successfully maps the registry data to the strain data. Similar ideas are used to predict the conditions under which an oscillating mechanical probe will or will not ... Experiments on single, embryonic cardiomyocytes [1] show that both striation, an indication of the structural registry in muscle fibers, as well as the contractile strains produced by beating cardiac muscle cells, can be optimized by substrate stiffness. We show theoretically how the substrate rigidity dependence of the registry data can be mapped onto that of the strain measurements. The elasticity-mediated structural registry is determined [2] including both the elastic interactions of neighboring, actively contractile acto-myosin units as well as the noise inherent in biological systems. By assuming that structurally registered myofibrils also tend to beat in phase, we explain the observed dependence of both structural striation and beating strain measurements of embryonic heart muscle cells on substrate stiffness in a unified manner. The agreement of our ideas with experiment suggests that the correlated beating of heart cells may be limited by the structural registry of the myofibrils which in turn is regulated by their elastic environment.

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