Muscle Physiology - General Overview

Muscle Physiology — General Overview

The muscle physiology laboratory is dedicated to the education and training of students via scientific research.
Our scientific goal is to understand the design and plasticity of the neuromuscular system.

The UCSD muscle physiology laboratory, located in the Veterans Administration Medical Center, was dedicated on September 16, 1986. Currently, the laboratory is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Veterans Administration, and private corporations.

The laboratory consists of physiologists, hand surgeons, residents, graduate students, and undergraduates. We encourage collaboration with faculty and scholars from other Universities.

To discover the underlying design principles of the neuromuscular physiology system.
To describe and understand the adaptive ability of the neuromuscular system.
To effectively communicate these findings to the scientific and medical communities.
To teach the scientific method to high school, undergraduate, graduate, medical and post-doctoral students.
To develop student's critical thinking ability.
To provide career guidance at many levels via exposure, discussion and debate.

All of our studies fall into one of two general categories:

Currently, the objectives of the laboratory are:

To understand the relationship between sarcomere length and joint angle in amphibian and mammalian systems.
To understand the architectural design of human arm muscles commonly used in surgical tendon transfer procedures.
To develop analytic and graphical models of muscles, tendons, and the joints on which they act.
To identify the factors which affect strength recovery in humans following surgical tendon transfer.
To identify the cellular events associated with muscle adaptation to surgical manipulation.
To understand the physiological relevance of the various myosin isoforms.

An index of a few abstracts and papers from this year formatted for presentation on the WWW. A more comprehensive list can be found in our Lab Bibliography.

Functional consequence of distal brachioradialis tendon release: A biomechanical study. Tirrell TF, Franko OI, Bhola S, Hentzen ER, Abrams RA, Lieber RL.
Role of the cytoskeleton in muscle transcriptional responses to altered use. Meyer GA, Schenk S, Lieber RL.
Reduced satellite cell population may lead to contractures in children with cerebral palsy. Smith LR, Chambers HG, Lieber RL.
Systems analysis of biological networks in skeletal muscle function. Smith LR, Meyer G, Lieber RL.
Transcriptional abnormalities of hamstring muscle contractures in children with cerebral palsy. Smith LR, Chambers HG, Subramaniam S, Lieber RL.
Anatomical, architectural, and biochemical diversity of the murine forelimb muscles. Mathewson MA, Chapman MA, Hentzen ER, Fridén J, Lieber RL.
Human skeletal muscle biochemical diversity. Tirrell TF, Cook MS, Carr JA, Lin E, Ward SR, Lieber RL.
Muscle excursion does not correlate with increased serial sarcomere number after muscle adaptation to stretched tendon transfer. Takahashi M, Ward SR, Fridén J, Lieber RL.
Sample size considerations in human muscle architecture studies. Tuttle LJ, Ward SR, Lieber RL.
Skeletal muscle fibrosis develops in response to desmin deletion. Meyer GA, Lieber RL.
Passive mechanical properties and related proteins change with botulinum neurotoxin A injection of normal skeletal muscle. Thacker BE, Tomiya A, Hulst JB, Suzuki KP, Bremner SN, Gastwirt RF, Greaser ML, Lieber RL, Ward SR.
Passive mechanical properties of rat abdominal wall muscles suggest an important role of the extracellular connective tissue matrix. Brown SH, Carr JA, Ward SR, Lieber RL.
The use of neural networks and texture analysis for rapid objective selection of regions of interest in cytoskeletal images. Felder Derkacs AD, Ward SR, Lieber RL.
Simultaneous powering of forearm pronation and key pinch in tetraplegia using a single muscle-tendon unit. Fridén J, Reinholdt C, Gohritz A, Peace WJ, Ward SR, Lieber RL.

The skeletal muscle physiology laboratory is supported by the Veterans Administration, the National Institutes of Health, NASA and Preferred Medical Products.