Morphomechanical model of the torsional c-looping in the embryonic heart

TL;DR

This paper introduces a morphomechanical model of the embryonic heart tube's torsion during c-looping, explaining it as a mechanical instability caused by residual stresses from tissue remodelling, supported by stability analysis and simulations.

Contribution

It presents a nonlinear elastic model for heart tube torsion, linking tissue remodelling to mechanical instability and morphological transition during embryonic development.

Findings

The model predicts the onset of c-looping based on aspect ratios and remodelling rate.

Numerical simulations produce realistic looped shapes matching physiological conditions.

The approach links cellular remodelling to mechanical forces driving heart morphogenesis.

Abstract

Before septation processes shape its four chambers, the embryonic heart is a straight tube that spontaneously bends and twists breaking the left-right symmetry. In particular, the heart tube is subjected to a cell remodelling inducing ventral bending and dextral torsion during the c-looping phase. In this work we propose a morphomechanical model for the torsion of the heart tube, that behaves as a nonlinear elastic body. We hypothesize that this spontaneous looping can be modeled as a mechanical instability due to accumulation of residual stresses induced by the geometrical frustration of tissue remodelling, which mimics the cellular rearrangement within the heart tube. Thus, we perform a linear stability analysis of the resulting nonlinear elastic boundary value problem to determine the onset of c-looping as a function of the aspect ratios of the tube and of the internal remodelling rate. We perform numerical simulations to study the fully nonlinear morphological transition, showing that the soft tube develops a realistic self-contacting looped shape in the physiological range of geometrical parameters.