Scale-invariant fluctuations at different levels of organization in developing heart cell networks

In the last few years it has been realized that the intervals of spontaneous spiking events in the intact heart exhibit coexisting scale-invariant count fluctuations and anticorrelated interspike intervals fluctuations. Here, we show experimentally that this feature is an intrinsic property of single isolated heart cells, which is preserved when the cells couple into networks. We present a model explaining this behavior at both the single cell and network levels.