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An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various papers within the issue on topics including biomedical engineering, computational biology and the role of ontologies in biology.

Spatial-temporal Ca^2+ dynamics due to Ca^2+ release, buffering, and reuptaking plays a central role in studying excitation–contraction (E–C) coupling in both normal and diseased cardiac myocytes. In this paper, we employ two numerical methods, namely, the meshless method and the finite element method, to model such Ca^2+ behaviors by solving a nonlinear system of reaction–diffusion partial differential equations at two scales. In particular, a subcellular model containing several realistic transverse tubules (or t-tubules) is investigated and assumed to reside at different locations relative to the cell membrane. To this end, the Ca^2+ concentration calculated from the whole-cell modeling is adopted as part of the boundary constraint in the subcellular model. The preliminary simulations show that Ca^2+ concentration changes in ventricular myocytes are mainly influenced by calcium release from t-tubules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discussion on the developed three dimensional (3-D) continuum model used for the laboratory observation of calcium ion (Ca2+) properties on rat myocytes. It provides information on the geometrical model and structural data observed and gathered on the rat's ventricular muscle cell. It also investigates mechanisms involving the basic principles of excitation-contraction (EC) coupling propagation in the observed ventricular myocytes. The study also reveals that the local Ca2+ spatiotemporal features signals that relies on the axial and cell surface diffusion distances.