Question

Part I

You are a volunteer in a California medical office of Dr. Williams. Dr. Williams specializes in rare neuromuscular and musculoskeletal disorders. You’re also a grad student and working with Dr. Williams has allowed you to gain first-hand experience with some of the material that you’re learning in your human physiology course.

Today a group of high school students is coming for a tour and Dr. Williams has asked you to prepare some information about muscles to present to the students, such as the neuromuscular junction (NMJ), skeletal muscle contraction, and issues that can arise when signaling between neurons and muscles does not happen as it is supposed to.

Questions [Critical Thinking and Communication]

1. Write a summary paragraph to explain the action of muscles to high school students as Dr. Williams instructed.

Part II – Joyce Snyder

After the high school group finishes their tour, Dr. Williams sees two patients.

Joyce Snyder is a biochemist working for a bio-warfare lab at a university. She is working on a project using sarin as a model substance. Suddenly, while working, the lab alarms go off and Joyce accidentally knocks a vial of sarin over and a bit of the liquid splashes onto her arm between her gloves and lab coat.

She suddenly starts to feel dizzy, her heart starts pounding harder than ever, and she has shortness of breath. She feels incredibly sluggish and tries to get to the exit. As she approaches the lab door, her muscles cramp and she falls down and hits her head, knocking her unconscious. Her colleagues from across the hall happen to see her fall and call for help. Joyce is given oxygen and taken to the nearby hospital.

Joyce is admitted to the hospital and Dr. Williams examines her. Joyce is unconscious but seems to be experiencing some paralysis, so Dr. Williams orders blood work. The results are listed in Table 1 below, the top line represents her initial readings; the following three rows are for subsequent time points. You must work with your team members to interpret all clinical values.

Dr. Williams looks over the results and knows from Joyce ’s colleague that she is a bioweapons biochemist. Dr. Williams figures out that Joyce has been working on synthesizing a new sarin-like biochemical weapon and suspects she has a type of poisoning that is like that of sarin.

Questions [Critical Thinking]

2. What symptoms is Joyce experiencing?

3. What is the role of AChE in the NMJ.

please include all your references!!!

Answer 1

1 Muscles are the structures in our body which has the ability to contract and relax to facilitate the movement of the body.To move the body or the body part there is involvement of a group of muscles.The main type of muscle action is contraction and there are mainly three types of contraction.They are isometric contraction,concentric contraction and eccentric contraction.First will see the structure of muscle.Each muscle contains fasciclec and the fascicles are made up of muscle fibers.These muscle fibers has myofibrils which has the contractile unit in it called sarcomere.In sarcomere there is two types of layes called myosine line with ATP recepter and atin filament.

Whatever it may be the action of contraction occurs in the muscle as result of the impulses which reaches the muscle from the nervous system.Each myofibril has a synaptic cleft which receive the axon terminals.These axon terminals has synaptic vessels that contains acetylecholine which is the neurotransmitter.Once the neurotransmitter enter the muscle fiber it binds with the protein in the muscle and acts a ion channel and it causes the sodiumion to enter and the potasium ion toleave and this makes the pottencila difference.Due to this continuous potential difference thriughout the muscle fiber the calcium gets released,which is reponsible for the muscle contraction.This calcium binds the troponin and make the myosin head to pull the atin filament.This causes the contraction.

2.she is experiencing the symptom of organophosphate toxicity as sarin is a synthetic organophospherous compound.

The symptoms include

Dizziness,increased heart rate,muscle twitching,muscle weakness,irregular heart beat,collapse,paralysis and coma.

3.The role of acetyle cholinestrase in the neuromuscular junction is the breakdown or hydrolising the acetylecholine which is secreted by the synaptic vessel to the synaptic cleft.