The establishment of regular beating in populations of pacemaker heart cells. A study with tissue-cultured rat heart cells.

Single isolated neonatal rat heart cells beat slowly (mean beating interval duration in the range of seconds) and irregularly (coefficient of variation greater than 40%). It is shown that slowness and irregularity of beating are intrinsic properties of the cells and are not caused by dissociation damage or lack of conditioning factors in the culture medium. When cell contacts are established either by letting the cultures grow for given amounts of time or by plating cells at increasing densities both interval duration and irregularity decrease. The beating regularity of small groups of interconnected cells (3 to 35 cells) and larger groups (200 to 15000 cells) is comparable. There is no clear cut proportionality between number of interconnected cells and beating regularity. Confluent monolayers beat fast (mean interval duration ranging between 200 and 400 ms and regular (coefficient of variation less than 5%). The hypothesis is discussed that this clock-like behavior of monolayers of heart cells is caused by the interaction of several pacemaker centers which are by themselves less regular and beat more slowly.