Muscle Contraction Lab Report

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Muscle contractions are an essential part of carrying out our daily lives. They allow us to hold this lab report and turn the pages, as well as, move our eyes across this paper. In order to fully understand a skeletal muscle contraction, one must take a look at the anatomy and physiology on a cellular level. Each muscle is organized into a bundle of muscles fibers along with blood vessels and nerves, which help to send the signals to contract. Within each muscle fiber are myofibrils, which are the basic muscle cells that contain the contractile units, called sarcomeres. The chains of sarcomeres found in each myofibril are what give vertebrates muscles their striated appearance. The sliding filament mechanism between the thick and thin filaments …show more content…
This process is driven by a physical interaction between myosin heads and adjacent actin filaments, which is governed by the regulatory proteins troponin and tropomyosin. Troponin is a Ca++ binding protein that allows myosin to bind by controlling the shape of tropomyosin, which is part of the thin filament actin. When action potentials have been sent from the central nervous system to the effector neurons, muscles receive the signals through T-tubules of the sarcolemma which then triggers release of Ca++. The Ca++ ions then bind to troponin which moves tropomyosin from its blocking position and allows myosin to bind to actin (Johnsen, p. 38). Subsequent binding and hydrolysis of ATP to the myosin head helps to produce the conformational change to the myosin head in order to produce the power strokes that move actin filaments.
In this lab exercise, we studied the responses of many muscle fibers with their motor neurons attached, specifically, a frog gastrocnemius. The property of excitable tissue is defined by the all-or-nothing law where the nature of the response does not depend on the strength of the stimulus, as long as the strength reached threshold. What we were interested in studying however, was how the strength of the muscle response (or tension developed) can be
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