Nature's Versatile Engine: Insect Flight Muscle Inside and Out
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Edited By:Jim O. VigoreauxUniversity of Vermont ISBN: 978-0-387-25798-3 Published: 2005-11-15 This book may be purchased as an eBook (pdf) for $99, or individual chapters (pdf) may be purchased from the list below for $19. |
Chapters available from this book
Insect Flight Muscle Chemomechanics
David Maughan and Douglas Swank
The biochemical and mechanical basis of insect flight has captivated the interest of biologists for decades. This chapter presents a brief review of the approaches used and results obtained by investigators intent on understanding the chemomechanical basis of contraction in insect muscle. We are m...
Troponin, Tropomyosin and GST-2
Alberto Ferrus
Troponin, Tropomyosin and GST are generic names of protein families that play a variety of cellular roles in the biology of uni- and multicellular organisms. In muscles, specific family members are associated to the actin based thin filament where they contribute to the sarcomere contraction/rela...
A Naturalist’s View of Insect Flight Muscle
Bernd Heinrich
By almost any measure, insects as a group are an astounding evolutionary achievement. Through their diversity and their adaptation to a great range of life-styles, forms, and physical and biological environments, they offer unparalleled insights into the constraints, selective pressures and the r...
Structure of The Insect Thick Filaments
Gernot Beinbrech and Gereon Ader
Myosin filaments of insect indirect flight muscles (IFM) are 17 to 19 nm thick and 1.9 to 3.6 µm long structures with probably 4 cross-bridges per level (=crown). These crowns repeat in periods of 14.5 nm along the longitudinal axis of the filament. The cross-bridges are located at 4 helical trac...
Insect Flight Muscle Chemomechanics
David Maughan and Douglas Swank
The biochemical and mechanical basis of insect flight has captivated the interest of biologists for decades. This chapter presents a brief review of the approaches used and results obtained by investigators intent on understanding the chemomechanical basis of contraction in insect muscle. We are ...
3D Structure of Myosin Crossbridges in Insect Flight Muscle: Toward Visualization of the Conformations During Myosin Motor Action
Mary C. Reedy
Insect flight muscle (IFM) provides a model system that allows direct viewing of individual myosin head structures in situ that give rise to the average structures reported by X-ray patterns and by the mechanical behavior of the fibers. Coordinating x-ray diffraction, physiological monitoring and...
The Contributions of Genetics to the Study of Insect Flight Muscle Function
Richard M. Cripps
The utility of Drosophila as a model genetic organism has had a profound impact upon our understanding of muscle assembly and function. This has arisen from the large number of mutant alleles that have been isolated and characterized using a variety of screens, and also reflects an highly efficie...
Actin and Arthrin
John C. Sparrow
Filamentous actin forms the core of all muscle thin filaments and is an integral part of the acto-myosin motor system that powers muscle contraction. Muscle actin isoforms show considerable sequence conservation compared to all actins, but insect actins form a distinct group. Within insect actins...
X-Ray Diffraction of Indirect Flight Muscle from Drosophila in Vivo
Thomas C. Irving
The indirect flight muscle (IFM) of the fruit fly, Drosophila, represents a powerful model system for integrated structure and function studies because of the ease of genetically manipulating this organism. Recent advances in synchrotron technology have allowed collection of high quality two dime...
Molecular Assays for Acto-myosin Interactions
John C. Sparrow and Michael A. Geeves
The indirect flight muscles of insects are highly specialised to produce power for flight. Asynchronous flight muscle contraction is largely isometric (3-4% shortening in vivo) and can occur at high oscillatory frequencies. Contraction kinetics are the property of the myofibrils and differences i...
Stretch Activation: Toward a Molecular Mechanism
Jeffrey R. Moore
Insect flight is often powered by high wing beat frequencies. Surprisingly, the flight muscles of some insects are capable of driving high wing beats without extensive calcium cycling machinery. Rather than precisely timed signals from motor neurons driving each contraction, nervous stimulation i...
Mapping Myofibrillar Protein Interactions by Mutational Proteomics
Joshua A. Henkin and Jim O. Vigoreaux
The myofibril is a multiprotein complex that performs the contractile activity of the muscle cell. Biochemical experiments over the past decades have revealed protein interactions that are critical for regulated contractile activity and for maintaining myofibril integrity and structural stability...
Sustained High Power Performance: Possible Strategies for Integrating Energy Supply and Demand in Flight Muscle
Vivek Vishnudas and Jim O. Vigoreaux
The high power output necessary for insect flight has resulted in the evolution of muscles with large and abundant myofibrils, the so called ‘myofibrillar’ muscles. In principle, this modification should come with a trade-off as the broader diameter of the myofibril would slow ATP/ADP flux and po...
Novel Myosin Associated Proteins
Byron Barton and Jim O. Vigoreaux
Asynchronous insect flight muscle (IFM) relies on high frequency operation to achieve higher power output than a comparable synchronous muscle. The biochemical, ultra structural, and mechanical adaptations that define the performance of this muscle type are not completely understood. IFM is chara...
The Thin Filament in Insect Flight Muscle
Kevin R. Leonard and Belinda Bullard
In this chapter we describe the special properties of insect muscle thin filament proteins and the way in which they differ from those in vertebrates. As in the vertebrate, the repeating unit of the muscle fibre (sarcomere) contains interdigitated thick (myosin containing) and thin (actin contain...
The Insect Z-band
Judith D. Saide
The Z-band is an electron dense structure that borders sarcomeres in striated muscle. It is a complex assembly of proteins that organizes and stabilizes both thick and thin filament arrays in the contractile apparatus. By anchoring actin filaments and protein extensions of myosin filaments, the Z...
Myosin
Becky M. Miller and Sanford I. Bernstein
The molecular motor myosin, composed of two heavy chains and four light chains, is responsible for defining both structural and mechanical properties of insect flight muscle. Myosin polymerizes into thick filaments that are a major component of the sarcomeric units of myofibrils. In the presence ...
Paramyosin and Miniparamyosin
Margarita Cervera, Juan Jose Arredondo and Raquel Marco Ferreres
In Drosophila, paramyosin and miniparamyosin are structural components of thick filaments that have a similar structure to the myosin heavy chain rod tail. Both proteins are rod-like molecules with a high alpha-helical content in the long central domains, and exist as dimers. While miniparamyosin...
Comparative Physiology of Insect Flight Muscle
Robert K. Josephson
Insect flight is powered by muscles that attach more-or-less directly to the wings (direct flight muscles) and muscles that bring about wing movement by distorting the insect’s thorax (indirect flight muscles). Flight stability and steering are achieved by differential activation of power muscles...
Functional and Ecological Effects of Isoform Variation in Insect Flight Muscle
James H. Marden
Nearly all of the known structural molecules in insect flight muscles exist as multiple isoforms. Both post-transcriptional and post-translational mechanisms are responsible for this variability. Among these mechanisms, alternative splicing is noteworthy for the ability to create a large number o...
Some Functions of Proteins from the Drosophila Sallimus (sls) Gene
Belinda Bullard, Mark C. Leake and Kevin Leonard
Insect flight muscles contract at high frequencies and are activated by periodically stretching the muscles. For the stretch to have an effect, the muscles must be stiff. Two elastic proteins, projectin and kettin, are responsible for a large part of the muscle stiffness. Thin filaments containin...
Muscle Systems Design and Integration
Fritz-Olaf Lehmann
The recent advances in experimental technology allows us to assess the mechanical power output and function of the Drosophila flight muscle within the context of the flying animal. In an intact animal, production and control of aerodynamic forces during flight depend on several factors including ...
Projectin the Elastic Protein of the C-filaments
Agnes Ayme-Southgate and Richard Southgate
In adult insects, the highly specialized indirect flight muscles (abbreviated as IFMs) are powerful muscles adapted for the rapid repeated contractions necessary for flight. These muscles are referred to as asynchronous muscles, because they undergo multiple rounds of contraction for each single ...
