Excitation wave propagation in a patterned multi-domain cardiac tissue

Electrospun fibrous mats are widely used in the contemporary cardiac tissue engineering as the substrates for growing cardiac cells. The substrate with chaotically oriented nanofibers leads to the growth of cardiac tissue with randomly oriented, but internally morphologically anisotropic clusters or domains. The domain structure affects the stability of the excitation propagation and we studied the stability of the propagating excitation waves versus the average size of the domains and the externally applied excitation rate. In an experimental model based on neonatal rat cardiac tissue monolayers, as well as in the computer simulations we found that increase of domain sizes leads to the decrease of the critical stimulation frequencies, thus evidencing that larger domains are having a higher arrhythmogenic effect.