The microtubule-organizing complex and the Golgi apparatus are co-localized around the entire nuclear envelope of interphase cardiac myocytes.

In most animal cells, the microtubule-organizing centre (MTOC) and the Golgi apparatus (GA) are co-localized on one side of the nucleus, an arrangement that allows these cells to acquire a functional polarity. An exception has been reported in the skeletal muscle myotube, where the MTOC and GA exhibit a circumnuclear distribution. We wished to determine if this unusual distribution of the MTOC and GA was peculiar to syncytial myotubes or reflected a pattern found in muscle cells generally. Immunofluorescence microscopic studies of cultured chicken skeletal muscle, cardiac muscle and gizzard smooth muscle cells were carried out using preimmune sera that recognized the pericentriolar material, anti-tubulin antibodies to label the MTOC, and fluorescent wheat-germ agglutinin to label the GA. These studies have shown that cardiac myocytes possess a circumnuclear distribution of their MTOC and GA as do skeletal myotubes, but smooth muscle cells exhibit the centrosomal MTOC and GA distribution found in most other cells. The circumnuclear MTOC/GA distribution therefore is associated with striated muscle cells. We also found that as embryonic cardiac myocytes pass through the cell cycle the microtubule-organizing activity in these cells switches from a circumnuclear distribution in interphase to the conventional centrosomal location during mitosis. Thus, cardiac myocytes provide a rare example of mononucleated animal cells that do not display a centrosomal MTOC or a polarized GA, and also reveal a system in which the MTOC structure can be reversibly altered in a cell cycle-dependent manner.