Skeletal muscle meets cardiac muscle

Cardiac Meets Skeletal: What's New in Microfluidic Models for Muscle Tissue Engineering.

In the last few years microfluidics and microfabrication technique principles have been extensively exploited for biomedical applications. In this framework, organs-on-a-chip represent promising tools to reproduce key features of functional tissue units within microscale culture chambers. These systems offer the possibility to investigate the effects of biochemical, mechanical, and electrical s...

Electromechanical Coupling between Skeletal and Cardiac Muscle

Skeletal myoblasts form grafts of mature muscle in injured hearts, and these grafts contract when exogenously stimulated. It is not known, however, whether cardiac muscle can form electromechanical junctions with skeletal muscle and induce its synchronous contraction. Here, we report that undifferentiated rat skeletal myoblasts expressed N-cadherin and connexin43, major adhesion and gap junctio...

Lipotoxicity in cardiac and skeletal muscle

Lipotoxicity is defined as the untoward consequences of the accumulation of excess lipid in non-adipose tissue. Fatty acids are an important substrate for myocyte metabolism, yet mismatch of cellular uptake and utilization results in lipid accumulation that is clearly detrimental. Within the myocyte, lipotoxicity can lead to cellular dysfunction, resulting in defective contraction or relaxation...

Cardiac assistance from skeletal muscle: a reappraisal.

Cardiac assistance from skeletal muscle offers an attractive surgical solution to the problem of end-stage heart failure, yet it is widely regarded as a failed approach. I argue here that this is an outdated assessment. Systematic progress has been made over the last 25 years in understanding the relevant basic science. In the light of these advances we should be reconsidering the place of skel...

Skeletal and cardiac muscle blood flow.