Each heart muscle cell consists of numerous parallel filaments comprising repeated subunits. When the heart beats, each individual filament contracts to produce muscle cell contractions.
Optimally, all the filaments should contract in a synchronized manner, thus ensuring the greatest amplitude of contraction for each muscle cell, and ultimately, the strongest and most effective beating of the entire heart.
However, a new theoretical model proposed and analyzed by professor Samuel Safran, PhD, and postdoctoral fellow Kinjal Dasbiswas, PhD, suggests that the filaments contract together only when their subunits, and subunit boundaries, are aligned with one another.
Since such alignment usually only happens among a limited number of neighboring filaments, aligned filaments contract together as a bundle, but each such bundle contracts out of phase with others. Therefore, a heart cell does not necessarily beat as a single uniform entity; rather, the number of different beating entities in the cell depends on the bundle number, which may reach more than two dozen.
The theory further predicted that the alignment of the filaments in the heart muscle cell depends on the cell's physical environment; more specifically on the elasticity of the supporting structure called the extracellular matrix.
The new understanding may one day help design improved treatments for heart disease. For example, in the future, if new heart cells are grown to replace diseased ones, their growth environment may be manipulated so that their structure is well-ordered and, to paraphrase Keats, all their filaments beat as one.
[Source: Weizmann Institute of Science]