Evolution of Intracellular Ca2 + Waves from about 10,000 RyR Clusters: Towards Solving a Computationally Daunting Task

  • Authors:

  • Pan Li;Wenjie Wei;Xing Cai;Christian Soeller;Mark B. Cannell;Arun V. Holden

  • Affiliations:

  • Center of Biomedical Computing, Simula research laboratory, Lysaker, Norway 1325;Center of Biomedical Computing, Simula research laboratory, Lysaker, Norway 1325;Center of Biomedical Computing, Simula research laboratory, Lysaker, Norway 1325;Department of Physiology, School of Medical Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;Department of Physiology, School of Medical Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;Computational Biology Laboratory, Institute of Membrane and Systems Biology, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom LS2 9JT

  • Venue:
  • FIMH '09 Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Functional Imaging and Modeling of the Heart
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Detailed knowledge of spatial-temporal behaviours of intracellular calcium dynamics is very important in understanding excitation-contraction coupling of cardiac myocytes under both normal and pathological conditions, such as initiation and propagation of spontaneous calcium waves. A full cell simulation integrating about 10,000 Ca2 + release units (CRUs) in a typical cardiac myocyte is considered a multi-scale, computationally demanding problem. In this paper, we imported an experimentally obtained spatial distribution of Ryanodine Receptor (RyR) clusters into a spatially extended, stochastic model of intracellular Ca2 + dynamics, to investigate the role of the structural bifurcation of Z-disks on the initiation and propagation of intracellular Ca2 + waves from spatially symmetric Ca2 + sparks. Besides, we also proposed a simple parallelization strategy to increase computational speed for this chanllenging problem in cardiac modelling.