[Mechanobiology and the Heart]

Mechanobiology has been focusing on biological research regarding mechanisms of muscle force generation, or recently sensing and response to the force applied to the tissue or each cell. Therefore, the heart has been one of the target organs and studied extensively for a long time since late 19th century. Its force-length relationship was demonstrated as the Starling's law of the heart, which is one of the most important findings in mechanobiology. In late 20th century, excitation-contraction coupling in the muscle was demonstrated and then, molecular mechanisms are gradually elucidated including calcium homeostasis and signal transductions in various situations: under the effects of catecholamines, other vasoactive agents, or ischemia. Among them, recent findings suggest possible involvement of titin, the giant elastic protein connected with both actin and myosin, with basic mechanism of the Starling's law of the heart Pathological proliferation of the heart as hypertrophic remodeling has also been extensively studied in recent years, and its signal transduction from pressure overload and volume overload to respective morphological changes of the heart chamber are partially clarified.