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Contributions of Ca2+-Independent Thin Filament Activation to Cardiac Muscle Function.

ABSTRACT: Although Ca2+ is the principal regulator of contraction in striated muscle, in vitro evidence suggests that some actin-myosin interaction is still possible even in its absence. Whether this Ca2+-independent activation (CIA) occurs under physiological conditions remains unclear, as does its potential impact on the function of intact cardiac muscle. The purpose of this study was to investigate CIA using computational analysis. We added a structurally motivated representation of this phenomenon to an existing myofilament model, which allowed predictions of CIA-dependent muscle behavior. We found that a certain amount of CIA was essential for the model to reproduce reported effects of nonfunctional troponin C on myofilament force generation. Consequently, those data enabled estimation of ?GCIA, the energy barrier for activating a thin filament regulatory unit in the absence of Ca2+. Using this estimate of ?GCIA as a point of reference (?7 kJ mol(-1)), we examined its impact on various aspects of muscle function through additional simulations. CIA decreased the Hill coefficient of steady-state force while increasing myofilament Ca2+ sensitivity. At the same time, CIA had minimal effect on the rate of force redevelopment after slack/restretch. Simulations of twitch tension show that the presence of CIA increases peak tension while profoundly delaying relaxation. We tested the model's ability to represent perturbations to the Ca2+ regulatory mechanism by analyzing twitch records measured in transgenic mice expressing a cardiac troponin I mutation (R145G). The effects of the mutation on twitch dynamics were fully reproduced by a single parameter change, namely lowering ?GCIA by 2.3 kJ mol(-1) relative to its wild-type value. Our analyses suggest that CIA is present in cardiac muscle under normal conditions and that its modulation by gene mutations or other factors can alter both systolic and diastolic function.

SUBMITTER: Aboelkassem Y

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4656859 | biostudies-other | 2015 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Contributions of Ca2+-Independent Thin Filament Activation to Cardiac Muscle Function.

Aboelkassem Yasser Y Bonilla Jordan A JA McCabe Kimberly J KJ Campbell Stuart G SG

Biophysical journal 20151101 10

Although Ca2+ is the principal regulator of contraction in striated muscle, in vitro evidence suggests that some actin-myosin interaction is still possible even in its absence. Whether this Ca2+-independent activation (CIA) occurs under physiological conditions remains unclear, as does its potential impact on the function of intact cardiac muscle. The purpose of this study was to investigate CIA using computational analysis. We added a structurally motivated representation of this phenomenon to ...[more]

PMID: 26588569

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Project description:One of the complexities of understanding the pathology of familial forms of cardiac diseases is the level of mutation incorporation in sarcomeres. Computational models of the sarcomere that are spatially explicit offer an approach to study aspects of mutational incorporation into myofilaments that are more challenging to get at experimentally. We studied two well characterized mutations of cardiac TnC, L48Q and I61Q, that decrease or increase the release rate of Ca2+ from cTnC, k-Ca, resulting in HCM and DCM respectively [1]. Expression of these mutations in transgenic mice was used to provide experimental data for incorporation of 30 and 50% (respectively) into sarcomeres. Here we demonstrate that fixed length twitch contractions of trabeculae from mice containing mutant differ from WT; L48Q trabeculae have slower relaxation while I61Q trabeculae have markedly reduced peak tension. Using our multiscale modelling approach [2] we were able to describe the tension transients of WT mouse myocardium. Tension transients for the mutant cTnCs were simulated with changes in k-Ca, measured experimentally for each cTnC mutant in whole troponin complex, a change in the affinity of cTnC for cTnI, and a reduction in the number of detached crossbridges available for binding. A major advantage of the multiscale explicit 3-D model is that it predicts the effects of variable mutation incorporation, and the effects of variations in mutation distribution within thin filaments in sarcomeres. Such effects are currently impossible to explore experimentally. We explored random and clustered distributions of mutant cTnCs in thin filaments, as well as distributions of individual thin filaments with only WT or mutant cTnCs present. The effects of variable amounts of incorporation and non-random distribution of mutant cTnCs are more marked for I61Q than L48Q cTnC. We conclude that this approach can be effective for study on mutations in multiple proteins of the sarcomere. SUMMARY: A challenge in experimental studies of diseases is accounting for the effect of variable mutation incorporation into myofilaments. Here we use a spatially explicit computational approach, informed by experimental data from transgenic mice expressing one of two mutations in cardiac Troponin C that increase or decrease calcium sensitivity. We demonstrate that the model can accurately describe twitch contractions for the data and go on to explore the effect of variable mutant incorporation and localization on simulated cardiac muscle twitches.

Dataset Information

Contributions of Ca2+-Independent Thin Filament Activation to Cardiac Muscle Function.

Publications

Contributions of Ca2+-Independent Thin Filament Activation to Cardiac Muscle Function.

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