Introduction
Muscles are a fibrous bundle of tissues that contract to produce movement in the body. There are three different types of muscles, cardiac, skeletal, and smooth. Though these three different types of muscles serve slightly different purposes, they function very similarly. The main components of muscles are muscle fibers, myosin, actin, and a few more. Muscle contractions works primary off of the interaction between the proteins, actin and myosin. Troponin and tropomyosin work to regulate the contraction.
Purpose
The purpose of this lab was to learn about glycerinated muscle systems and how contraction works in relation to it.
Materials
Glycerinated muscle.
0.25% ATP in distilled…show more content… ATP was added to the fibers on a slide to watch as the strands shrunk in size and became more compacted. The strands were not able to stretch back out because there was no reaction process induced that would cause them to behave that way. The muscles were shown to contract most with ATP and salt. Salt alone would not cause contraction because ATP is necessary. Calcium is necessary as well, because troponin and tropomyosin can block the binding sites of myosin.
Questions
Why do the muscle strands remain contracted permanently after adding the ATP solutions? Because there was no reaction to stretch the muscle out again I know that in living tissues, calcium is required to activate muscle contraction. Why is calcium not needed in the glycerinated muscle? Because the myosin binding sites are blocked when the tropomyosin and troponin is interrupted by glycerination. What is the role of the ATP, KCl, and MgCl2 solutions in muscle contraction? ATP activates the myosin heads in the muscle. KCl and MgCl2 strengthen muscle contraction when added to ATP because the myosin attracts to its ions. Why are my muscle fibers not contracting? Because of
