OBJECTIVE Effects of cyclic stretch on endothelial cells are studied usually by exposing cells cultured under stretch-free conditions to some levels of cyclic stretch, but in vivo these cells experience both increase and decrease in stretch. Experiments were designed to study how endothelial cells maintained under certain levels of cyclic stretch responded to shifts in stretch frequencies and a...

Stretch-activated channels (SACs) have been considered as one of the possible modulators on the mechanisms of mechano-electrical feedback (MEF) in the heart. With the abilities to modulate action potential duration (APD) during the systolic period and to trigger action potentials directly by diastolic stretch, SACs could play an important role on stretch-induced arrhythmias. The objective of th...

A classical voltage-sensitive channel is tension sensitive--the kinetics of Shaker and S3-S4 linker deletion mutants change with membrane stretch (Tabarean, I.V., and C.E. Morris. 2002. Biophys. J. 82:2982-2994.). Does stretch distort the channel protein, producing novel channel states, or, more interestingly, are existing transitions inherently tension sensitive? We examined stretch and voltag...

The pacemaker and pattern generator that underlies the cyclical generation of spontaneous colonic migrating motor complexes (CMMCs) has recently been identified to lie within the myenteric plexus and/or muscularis externa. Neither the mucosa, nor the release of substances from the mucosa were found to be required for the spontaneous generation of CMMCs. However, it is known that stretch applied...

Work output of rat gastrocnemius medialis (GM) muscle (N = 5) was measured for stretch-shortening contractions, in which initiation of stretch occurred prior to the onset of activation, and for contractions with an isometric prephase. Duration of the active prephase (prestretch and pre-isometric) varied from 20 to 200 ms. Subsequent shortening (from optimum length + 4 mm to optimum length -2mm)...

II Binary search 4 II-A Proof of Theorem 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 II-B Binary search with stretch-intervals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 II-B.1 Within a stretch-interval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 II-B.2 Binary search among stretch intervals . . . . . . . . . . . ...

Alterations in loading conditions and muscle length influence the electrophysiology of ventricular myocardium and may play a role in arrhythmogenesis in globally dilated or dyskinetic ventricles. To test the hypothesis that stretch can initiate arrhythmias in normal myocardium, the response to graded mechanical stretch was studied in seven isolated blood-perfused canine ventricles. After eight ...

Alveolar epithelial cells (AEC) maintain integrity of the blood-gas barrier with gasket-like intercellular tight junctions (TJ) that are anchored internally to the actin cytoskeleton. We hypothesize that stretch rapidly reorganizes actin (<10 min) into a perijunctional actin ring (PJAR) in a manner that is dependent on magnitude and frequency of the stretch, accompanied by spontaneous movement ...

Hypertension and myocardial infarction are associated with the onset of hypertrophy. Hypertrophy is a compensatory response mechanism to increases in mechanical load due to pressure or volume overload. It is characterized by extracellular matrix remodeling and hypertrophic growth of adult cardiomyocytes. Production of Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF), which acts as an angiogenic factor...

BACKGROUND Much of the experimental work in soft tissue mechanics has been focused on fitting approximate relations for specific tissue types from aggregate data on multiple samples of the tissue. Such relations are needed for modeling applications and have reasonable predictability - especially given the natural variance in specimens. There is, however, much theoretical and experimental work t...