Intensity Fluctuation Autocorrelation Studies of the Dynamics of Muscular Contraction

Abstract

The past thirty to forty years of physiological, biochemical, and electron microscopic and x-ray diffraction structural studies on striated muscle have provided biologists with a molecular model of muscle. This model suggests a dynamic mechanism for the process which transforms chemical energy to mechanical energy in muscle. Recently, many of the molecular components characteristic of muscle have been found associated with other important physiological processes in other organs. For example, actin, a contractile protein, has been found in large amounts in nerve tissue, in blood platelets, and in amoeboid cells. The other most important contractile protein, myosin, or primitive forms of it, has also been found in these cells. The suspicion is that the streaming of cytoplasm and the release of various transmitter substances in nerve cells, amoeboid movement, and retraction in blood clots are all driven by some modified form of the actin-myosin contractile system that is found in its most highly organized form in muscle.