1,721,190 research outputs found
Silvestro Marcucci, L' «idealismo» scientifico di William Whewell
No full textRobert Jean-Dominique. Silvestro Marcucci, L' «idealismo» scientifico di William Whewell. In: Revue Philosophique de Louvain. Troisième série, tome 65, n°87, 1967. p. 400
Increase of resting muscle stiffness, a less considered component of age-related skeletal muscle impairment
Full text linkElderly people perform more slowly movements of everyday life as rising from a chair, walking, and climbing stairs. This is in the first place due to the loss of muscle contractile force which is even more pronounced than the loss of muscle mass. In addition, a secondary, but not negligible, component is the rigidity or increased stiffness which requires greater effort to produce the same movement and limits the range of motion of the joints. In this short review, we discuss the possible determinants of the limitations of joint mobility in healthy elderly, starting with the age-dependent alterations of the articular structure and focusing on the increased stiffness of the skeletal muscles. Thereafter, the possible mechanisms of the increased stiffness of the muscle-tendon complex are considered, among them changes in the muscle fibers, alterations of the connective tissue components, i.e., extracellular matrix (ECM), aponeurosis, tendon and fascia, and remodeling of the neural pattern of muscle activation that increases antagonist co-activation
Editorial: The Long-Lasting Quest for Nuclear Interactions: The Past, the Present and the Future
Full text linkA controversial issue: Can mitochondria modulate cytosolic calcium and contraction of skeletal muscle fibers?
Full text linkMitochondria are characterized by a high capacity to accumulate calcium thanks to the electrochemical gradient created by the extrusion of protons in the respiratory chain. Thereby calcium can enter crossing the inner mitochondrial membrane via MCU complex, a high-capacity, low-affinity transport mechanism. Calcium uptake serves numerous purposes, among them the regulation of three dehydrogenases of the citric cycle, apoptosis via permeability transition, and, in some cell types, modulation of cytosolic calcium transients. This Review is focused on mitochondrial calcium uptake in skeletal muscle fibers and aims to reanalyze its functional impact. In particular, we ask whether mitochondrial calcium uptake is relevant for the control of cytosolic calcium transients and therefore of contractile performance. Recent data suggest that this may be the case, at least in particular conditions, as modified expression of MCU complex subunits or of proteins involved in mitochondrial dynamics and ablation of the main cytosolic calcium buffer, parvalbumin
Attached Molecular Motor in Trapped Single Molecule Assay as a Bi-Dimensional Brownian Multi-Stable System
No full textTo elucidate the physical properties of the force generation mechanism in molecular motors, we have obtained an analytical solution of the bidimensional Fokker-Plank equation which describes a common setup used in single molecule experiments. As a first application of this general result, we have shown that the size of the trapping system affects the dwell time of a multistable particle linearly. A quantitative application to skeletal actomyosin complex, using direct observation of force generation dynamics in the literature, shows that the size of the trapping system used was important for increasing the dwell time of the myosin head stable states to an observable time scale. © 2013 American Physical Society
Mechanosensing in Myosin Filament Solves a 60 Years Old Conflict in Skeletal Muscle Modeling between High Power Output and Slow Rise in Tension
Full text linkAlmost 60 years ago Andrew Huxley with his seminal paper [Huxley1957] laid the foundation of modern muscle modeling, linking chemical events to mechanical performance. He described mechanics and energetics of muscle contraction through the cyclical attachment and detachment of myosin motors to the actin filament with ad hoc assumptions on the dependence of the rate constants on the strain of the myosin motors. That relatively simple hypothesis is still present in recent models, even though with several modifications to adapt the model to the different experimental constraints which became subsequently available. However, already in that paper, one controversial aspect of the model became clear. Relatively high attachment and detachment rates of myosin to the actin filament were needed to simulate the high power output at intermediate velocity of contraction. However, these rates were incompatible with the relatively slow rise in tension after activation, despite the rise should be generated by the same rate functions. This discrepancy has not been fully solved till today, despite several hypotheses have been forwarded to reconcile the two aspects.Here, using a conventional muscle model, we show that the recently revealed mechanosensing mechanism of recruitment of myosin motors [Linarietal2015] can solve this long standing problem without any further ad-hoc hypotheses
Proposed mechanism for the length dependence of the force developed in maximally activated muscles
Full text linkThe molecular bases of the Frank-Starling law of the heart and of its cellular counterpart, the length dependent activation (LDA), are largely unknown. However, the recent discovery of the thick filament activation, a second pathway beside the well-known calcium mediated thin filament activation, is promising for elucidating these mechanisms. The thick filament activation is mediated by the tension acting on it through the mechano-sensing (MS) mechanism and can be related to the LDA via the titin passive tension. Here, we propose a mechanism to explain the higher maximum tension at longer sarcomere lengths generated by a maximally activated muscle and test it in-silico with a single fiber and a ventricle model. The active tension distribution along the thick filament generates a reservoir of inactive motors at its free-end that can be activated by passive tension on a beat-to-beat timescale. The proposed mechanism is able to quantitatively account for the observed increment in tension at the fiber level, however, the ventricle model suggests that this component of the LDA is not crucial in physiological conditions
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