Cellular Respiration in Skeletal Muscles

Cellular Respiration in Skeletal Muscles

Every day we use our skeletal muscle to do simple task and without skeletal muscles, we will not be able to do anything. Szent-Gyorgyi (2011) muscle tissue contraction in rabbit’s muscles and discovered that ATP is a source for muscle contraction and not ADP. He proposed a mechanism to cellular respiration and was later used by Sir Hans Krebs to investigate the steps to glucose catabolism to make ATP. In this paper, I will be discussing the structure of muscle fibers and skeletal muscles, muscle contraction, biomechanics, and how glucose and fat are metabolized in the skeletal muscles.

Muscle fibers are cylindrical. They have a diameter around ten to one hundred micrometers and are generally a few centimeters long. Within each muscle cells, contains basal lamina of collagen and glycoproteins. Each fiber contains a structure called excitation-contraction coupling, which is used to make sure the each contractile stimulus is quickly and equally communicated throughout the muscle fiber.

The four different type of fiber types are: slow, fast and fatigue resistant, fast fatigable and fast intermediate. Slow muscle fibers have a long twitch time, which means that they have low peak forces, and have a high resistance to fatigue. These fibers are high in oxidative enzymes and are low in glycolytic markers and ATP activity.

Fast and fatigue resistant fibers are faster in contractions. Fast and fatigue resistant fibers maintains force production after contractions. These fibers are the opposite of slow fibers, instead they have a high ATP and glycolytic activity and have a low oxidative capacity. The fast fatigable have high contractions rates and large forces, but they cannot maintain tensions...

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...st the sacrolemma will depolarized, thus activation potentials along the T-tubules. This signal will transmit from along the T-tubules to sarcroplasmic reticulum's terminal sacs. Next, sarcoplasmic reticulum will release the calcium into the sarcroplasm leading to the next second event called contraction. The released calcium ions will now bind to troponin. This will cause the inhibition of actin and mysoin interaction to be released. The crossbridge of myosin filaments that are attached to the actin filaments, thus causing tension to be exerted and the muscles will shorten by sliding filament mechanism. The last event is called Relaxation. After the sliding of the filament mechanism, the calcium will be slowly pumped back into the scaroplasmic reticulum. The crossbridges will detach from the filaments. The inhibition of the actin and myosin will go back to normal.