Biophysicists unraveled a mystery of how muscles form at the molecular level and how they maintain their function. Nature Communications published the discovery, which may help in the design of treatments for muscle diseases such as dilated cardiomyopathy, one of the leading causes of heart failure.

“We’ve made a fundamental advance in understanding how the cellular cytoskeleton is assembled, especially in muscle cells,” says the senior author of the study.

The researchers upended a model relied on for more than four decades to explain how filaments of actin, a protein vital to cellular movement and other functions, form and maintain their length.