PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Harold M. McNamara
AU  - Rajath Salegame
AU  - Ziad Al Tanoury
AU  - Haitan Xu
AU  - Shahinoor Begum
AU  - Gloria Ortiz
AU  - Olivier Pourquie
AU  - Adam E. Cohen
TI  - Bioelectrical signaling via domain wall migration
AID  - 10.1101/570440
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 570440
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/03/08/570440.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/03/08/570440.full
AB  - Electrical signaling in biology is typically associated with action potentials, transient spikes in membrane voltage that return to baseline. Here we show theoretically and experimentally that homogeneous or nearly homogeneous tissues can undergo spontaneous symmetry breaking into domains with different resting potentials, separated by stable bioelectrical domain walls. Transitions from one resting potential to another can occur through long-range migration of these domain walls. We map bioelectrical domain wall motion using all-optical electrophysiology in an engineered stable cell line and in human iPSC-derived myoblasts. Bioelectrical domain wall migration may occur during embryonic development and during physiological signaling processes in polarized tissues. These results demonstrate a novel form of bioelectrical pattern formation and long-range signaling.One Sentence Summary We demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that bioelectrical domain walls can spontaneously arise in a homogeneous tissue, and that these domain walls can mediate long-range signaling in a bioengineered synthetic tissue and in human stem-cell derived myoblasts.