In: Anatomy and Physiology
Lab 2: The Muscular system
Q. In some versions of Muscular lab, students added ATP to fresh
muscle fibers, which was supposed to cause them to shorten.
However, it did not usually work; the fibers generally stayed the
same length. Provide one possible reason for this lack of
shortening.
Lab 2: The Muscular system
Q. In some versions of Muscular lab, students added ATP to fresh
muscle fibers, which was supposed to cause them to shorten.
However, it did not usually work; the fibers generally stayed the
same length. Provide one possible reason for this lack of
shortening.
Usually the addition of ATP to glycerinated muscle causes contraction of muscles and shorten the length of the muscles. When the contraction fails to happen, probably because that the muscle strand is too thicker. Muscles which are more than 0.2mm cross sectional diameter is usually consider as thick to observe the muscle contraction. Thinner the muscle, better the results.
In the absence of ATP, however muscle contraction will not happen as the myosin heads in the muscle will not be activated and it would not bind to the actin. The combination of ATP and salts contain KCl and MgCl2 are observed to increase the contraction strength of the muscle since it has high affinity for these ions.