Mechanical forces during muscle development.
Muscles are the major force producing tissue in the human body. While certain muscle types specialize in producing maximum forces, others are very enduring. An extreme example is the heart, which continuously beats for the entire life. Despite being specialized, all body muscles share similar contractile mini-machines called sarcomeres that are organized into regular higher order structures called myofibrils. The major sarcomeric components and their organizational principles are conserved throughout most of the animal kingdom. In this review, we discuss recent progress in the understanding of myofibril and sarcomere development largely obtained from in vivo models. We focus on the role of mechanical forces during muscle and myofibril development and propose a tension driven self-organization mechanism for myofibril formation. We discuss recent technological advances that allow quantification of forces across tissues or molecules in vitro and in vivo. Although their application towards muscle development is still in its infancy, these technologies are likely to provide fundamental new insights into the mechanobiology of muscle and myofibril development in the near future.
['Lemke|Sandra B|SB|', 'Schnorrer|Frank|F|']
D000199:Actins D000818:Animals D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena D064211:Connectin D004331:Drosophila melanogaster D018507:Gene Expression Regulation, Developmental D006801:Humans D016023:Integrins D024510:Muscle Development D009129:Muscle Tonus D009210:Myofibrils D015398:Signal Transduction D013710:Tendons
Force Muscle Sarcomere Tension Self-organization Biomechanics Integrin Myofibrillogenesis Titin