Memories of early work on muscle contraction and regulation in the 1950's and 1960's.
Professor Ebashi's epic work on the biochemistry of the regulation of muscle contraction began in the early 1950's, during the same period that work on the molecular basis of force production in muscle was also beginning. The latter work started in two MRC Research Units in the UK, and was continued jointly by the two workers from those Units who had, independently, gone to MIT to learn the new techniques of electron microscopy and to apply them to muscle. In a somewhat similar fashion, Professor Ebashi also spent one or two years in the USA, continuing his work on the role of calcium in muscle regulation in Lippman's laboratory, before returning to Japan to achieve the great breakthroughs in this work during the 1960's. Hanson and Huxley, after putting forward the overlapping actin and myosin filament arrays model for the striated muscle sarcomere, and subsequently the sliding filament model of muscle contraction (simultaneously with A.F Huxley and R. Niedergerke), returned to the UK to pursue detailed structural studies in separate Research Units, in a mixture of consultation, collaboration, and competition, during the later 1950's and throughout the 1960's. However, the path to enlightenment described here in some detail was somewhat more tortuous than the standard literature perhaps reveals. Nevertheless, by the time of the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Muscle Contraction in 1972, the two lines of enquiry on regulation itself, and on the tilting cross-bridge model of force production, had arrived at a good deal of common ground, and indeed the identification of troponin and its periodic distribution along the actin filaments had helped resolve a long-standing puzzle in the interpretation of the low angle X-ray diagram. Since then, an enormous amount of remarkable new work has been necessary to establish troponin regulation and the tilting cross-bridge mechanism in molecular detail, but the work in the 1950's and 1960's has provided a firm and accurate basis for our current understanding.
Huxley
Hugh E
HE
Rosenstiel Center, Brandeis University, 415 South Street, Waltham, MA 02454, USA.
D002118:Calcium / Q000378:metabolism*; D020013:Calcium Signaling / Q000502:physiology*; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006706:Homeostasis / Q000502:physiology; D007564:Japan; D008954:Models, Biological; D009119:Muscle Contraction / Q000502:physiology*; D018482:Muscle, Skeletal / Q000502:physiology*; D009482:Neurophysiology / Q000266:history*; D014336:Troponin / Q000502:physiology*
D014336:Troponin; D002118:Calcium