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Updated: Feb 3, 2026

Engineering Skeletal Muscle Tissues from Murine Myoblast Progenitor Cells and Application of Electrical Stimulation
Published on: March 19, 2013
Electrical Pulse Stimulation of Primary Human Skeletal Muscle Cells
1Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences, School of Pharmacy, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway. natasa.nikolic@farmasi.uio.no.
Abstract:
Electrical pulse stimulation (EPS) is an in vitro method of inducing contractions in cultured skeletal muscle cells of human and animal origin. Motor neuron activation of muscle fibers can be replaced by applying EPS on differentiated skeletal muscle cells (myotubes) in culture (Thelen et al. Biochemical J 321:845-848, 1997, Fujita et al. Exp Cell Res 313:1853-1865, 2007).Here we describe two protocols for EPS of human myotubes in 6-well plates: acute, high-frequency (single bipolar pulses of 2 ms, 100 Hz for 200 ms every fifth second for 5-60 min, 10-30 V) and chronic, low-frequency (single bipolar pulses of 2 ms, 1 Hz 10-30 V for 48 h) at the end of a 7 days long differentiation.
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