Locally and globally coupled oscillators in muscle.

ABSTRACT

At an intermediate activation level, striated muscle exhibits autonomous oscillations called SPOC, in which the basic contractile units, sarcomeres, oscillate in length, and various oscillatory patterns such as traveling waves and their disrupted forms appear in a myofibril. Here we show that these patterns are reproduced by mechanically connecting in series the unit model that explains characteristics of SPOC at the single-sarcomere level. We further reduce the connected model to phase equations, revealing that the combination of local and global couplings is crucial to the emergence of these patterns.