Pressure Helps Muscle Cells Join Together, Study Finds

Skeletal muscles, the muscles that help our bodies move, grow and repair themselves when cells called myoblasts fuse into long fibers. A research team has now shown that mechanical stress, which is a kind of physical force or pressure, can influence how these cells join together.

The study was carried out by a research team at the Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin (MPZPM). The team's results were published in the journal Nature Communications. The research was led by Benoît Ladoux, who heads the Tissue Mechanobiology division at MPZPM. Dr. Sushil Dubey, a postdoctoral researcher at MPZPM, is also an author of the study.

According to Phys.org, the researchers observed that myoblasts organize themselves into areas called domains. Within these domains, the cells point in distinct directions, and they form patterns shaped like comets and cloverleaves.

The team also found that areas with topological defects, which are breaks or irregularities in these patterns, are linked to places of high mechanical stress. The myoblasts were more likely to fuse at these locations of high stress.

The researchers further found that the myoblasts arrange the extracellular matrix, the material that surrounds cells and gives them support, to match their own alignment. Even after the original cells were removed, the extracellular matrix kept some features of the original mechanical stress pattern.

These findings suggest that mechanical forces take part in a feedback loop during muscle formation. In this loop, the forces and the cells affect each other as muscles develop.