Speaker
Description
Myotube creation and subsequent maturation into myofibers enables skeletal muscle to maintain the size, structure, and function required for contraction and regeneration. A single muscle fibre contains hundreds of nuclei within a large cytoplasmic volume, which is key in generating the necessary force for muscle contraction. Muscle growth throughout the lifespan of an adult is primarily through hypertrophy, where the fibres enlarge. This process is dependent on the recruitment of additional myoblasts, which fuse with pre-existing myofibers, thus enabling adaptation to exercise and mechanical loading. To understand this fundamental process of myoblast fusion in the development of skeletal muscle biology, we aim to develop a mathematical framework which can simulate and replicate these dynamics. Thus, we develop a phase-field framework simulating the fusion of cytoplasm while maintaining intact nuclei, allowing for the investigation of cell fusion of many single cells to form large multicellular structures. We confirm cell fusion through the merging of phases in 1D and identify key parameters. Further numerical simulations are then generated in 2D to observe the cell fusion in multi-cell scenarios, thus supporting the framework's ability to simulate such dynamics for myofiber formation. Finally, we simulate a scenario of 100 single-cell myoblasts forming a myofiber and compare it with microscopy images to validate the simulation through a qualitative comparison.
