A Startling New Twist on Muscle

Ph.D. student Sang Hoon Yeo and Professor Dinesh K. Pai, in collaboration with biologists in the US, shed new light on a long standing problem in biology: how our muscles actually work. Muscle is the most abundant tissue in the body and is responsible for all our movements. Yet many fundamental properties of muscle remain unexplained, perhaps because the largest known protein in the body, titin, was one of the last to be discovered. When this "missing link" in muscle structure is incorporated into a model of muscle contraction, it appears likely that muscle filaments don't just pull, but also twist. The twisting confers important spring-like properties, including storage and recovery of energy. The twisting model helps to explain the advantageous behavior that muscles exhibit when they shorten or are stretched.

Read the paper here.