Passive viscoelastic response of striated muscles

Abstract

Muscle cells with sarcomeric structure exhibit highly nontrivial passive mechanical response. The difficulty of its continuum modeling is due to the presence of long-range interactions transmitted by extended protein skeleton. To build a rheological model for muscle 'material' we use a stochastic micromodel and derive a linear response theory for a half-sarcomere. Instead of the first order rheological equation, anticipated by A.V. Hill on the phenomenological grounds, we obtain a novel second order equation. We use the values of the microscopic parameters for frog muscles to show that the proposed rheological model is in excellent quantitative agreement with physiological experiments.