Heterogeneous effects of fibroblast-myocyte coupling in different regions of the human atria under conditions of atrial fibrillation

Abstract

[EN] Myofibroblasts differ from fibroblasts in that they develop contractile proteins and exhibit a more depolarized resting membrane potential (Salvarani et al., 2017) and greater membrane capacitance (Sridhar et al., 2017). The differences in resting membrane potential and membrane capacitance between fibroblasts and myofibroblasts might have an important repercussion on the electrophysiology of coupled myocytes.

Cellular electrophysiology model from Koivumaki et al. (2014) representing atrial fibroblasts electrophysiology. The code implements the modifications for the gating variables as suggested by Maleckar et al. (2009) to change the resting membrane potential values (-26 mV, -45 mV and -65 mV). Additionally, the code also implements the sodium channel formulations from Koivumaki et al. (2014) and the parameters to represent the experimental results from Poulet et al. (2016) and Salvarani et al. (2017).