Abstract
Myotubes are mature muscle cells that form the basic structural element of skeletal muscle. When stretching skeletal muscles, myotubes are subjected to passive tension as well. This lead to alterations in myotube cytophysiology, which could be related with muscular biomechanics. During the past decades, much progresses have been made in exploring biomechanical properties of myotubes in vitro. In this review, we integrated the studies focusing on cultured myotubes being mechanically stretched, and classified these studies into several categories: amino acid and glucose uptake, protein turnover, myotube hypertrophy and atrophy, maturation, alignment, secretion of cytokines, cytoskeleton adaption, myotube damage, ion channel activation, and oxidative stress in myotubes. These biomechanical adaptions do not occur independently, but interconnect with each other as part of the systematic mechanoresponse of myotubes. The purpose of this review is to broaden our comprehensions of stretch-induced muscular alterations in cellular and molecular scales, and to point out future challenges and directions in investigating myotube biomechanical manifestations.
Highlights
Human body has over 600 skeletal muscles that are involved in locomotion, mastication, maintaining posture
We addressed the interconnections among different studies, and discussed the potential molecular mechanisms
In order to do so, microarray analysis will be a powerful tool to give us a global view of how myotubes respond to different types of stretch, rather than the examination of separate molecules and pathways as had been done before
Summary
Human body has over 600 skeletal muscles that are involved in locomotion, mastication, maintaining posture. Being an elastic and flexible tissue, skeletal muscles undergo passive lengthening under various conditions, and rapidly adapt to these stretching environments (e.g., daily growth and elongation of bone, stretching rehabilitation training, distraction osteogenesis, and functional orthopedic therapy). On organ and tissue scales, extensive studies have been made to passively stretch skeletal muscles in vitro, and to evaluate the resultant biomechanical adaptions of muscles to stretching (see review Mohammadkhah et al, 2016). Myotubes have been credited with morphological, metabolic, and biochemical properties similar to those of mature muscle fibers (Berggren et al, 2007; Aas et al, 2013), rendering myotubes a widely used model to study the metabolism and biochemistry of skeletal muscles on the cellular, subcellular and molecular scales. There is no comprehensive review regarding these various biomechanical responses of myotubes
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