BSC 1085L MUSCLE PHYSIOLOGY

I. A skeletal muscle (for example the biceps brachii) is composed of many thousands of
individual skeletal muscle cells. Muscle cells contract (get shorter) when they receive a
signal from a motor neuron. This lab will examine the relationship between the motor
neuron and the muscle at both the anatomical and physiological level.

A single signal from a motor neuron causes a single short lived contraction of a skeletal
muscle cell. This brief contraction is a muscle twitch. The force generated by the muscle
cell goes up as the cell contracts, and returns to baseline as the muscle cell relaxes and
returns to rest. The force generated by a single twitch is so small, and the length of time the
twitch lasts is so short, that we don’t move around by twitching our muscles

If the muscle is stimulated by the motor neuron a second time, and the force generated by the
muscle cell has not yet dropped down to baseline, the force generated by the second twitch
will add on top of the force left over from the first twitch. This is called temporal or wave
summation. An increase in stimulation frequency will therefore result in an increase in
overall contraction force. At a critical high frequency level of stimulation the muscle cell has
no time to relax between twitches resulting in a strong smooth contraction known as tetanus.

Since whole skeletal muscles are composed of many thousands of individual skeletal muscle
cells a second type of summation, called spatial summation, can occur. This type of
summation is based on the total number of muscle cells activated at any point in time. If 1%
of the cells in a whole muscle contract or if 50% of the cells in a whole muscle contract,
obviously the force generated by the whole muscle will be different. The greater the number
of individual cells contracting the greater the overall contraction force of the whole muscle.
If you hold a pencil in one hand and a heavy text book in the other and flex your elbow, you
would recruit more cells in your brachialis to lift the heavy book while recruiting fewer
muscle cells to lift the pencil.

By the end of lab (and on the lab practical) EVERYONE should be able to define the following
terms …READ YOUR TEXTBOOK AND LAB MANUAL FOR DEFINITIONS. ON THE
LAB EXAM, I will give you the definition and you will write the term

1. Motor Unit
2. Threshold Stimulus
3. Twitch
4. Temporal (or Wave) Summation
5. Tetanus
6. Spatial Summation
II. Complete: Skeletal Muscle Physiology Computer Simulation.

Starting on page PEx-17 in your lab manual, a computer simulation will be used to
demonstrate principles of skeletal muscle contraction.

In the computer lab, please open PEx 9.0 and complete all activities under exercise 2:
skeletal muscle physiology.

Be sure to complete and understand:

Activity 2: effect of stimulus voltage on skeletal muscle contraction
Activity 3: effect of stimulus frequency on skeletal muscle contraction
Activity 4: tetanus in isolated skeletal muscle
Activity 5: fatigue in isolated skeletal muscle
Activity 6: the skeletal muscle length-tension relationship
Activity 7: isotonic contractions and the load-velocity relationship