TY - JOUR T1 - Self-Organization of Muscle Cell Structure and Function A1 - Grosberg, Anna A1 - Kuo, Po-Ling A1 - Guo, Chin-Lin A1 - Geisse, Nicholas A. A1 - Bray, Mark-Anthony A1 - Adams, William J. A1 - Sheehy, Sean P. A1 - Parker, Kevin Kit Y1 - 2011/02/24 N2 - Author Summary How muscle is organized impacts its function. However, understanding how muscle organizes is challenging, as the process occurs over several length scales. We approach this multiscale coupling problem by constraining the overall shapes of muscle cells to indirectly control the organization of their intracellular space. We hypothesized the cellular boundary conditions direct the organization of cytoskeletal scaffolds. We developed a model of how the cytoskeleton of cardiomyocytes organizes with respect to boundary cues. Our computational and experimental results to control myocyte shape indicated that distinct muscle architectures arise from two main organizational mechanisms: the interaction between actin fibers, premyofibrils and focal adhesions, as well as cooperative alignment and parallel bundling of more mature myofibrils. We show that a hierarchy of processes regulate the self-organization of cardiomyocytes. Our results suggest that a symmetry break, due to the boundary conditions imposed on the cell, is responsible for polarization of the contractile cytoskeletal organization. JF - PLOS Computational Biology JA - PLOS Computational Biology VL - 7 IS - 2 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1001088 SP - e1001088 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1001088 ER -