Electron Tomography of Muscle Sarcomere
Dr Pradeep Luther, Group Leader
The goal of our lab is to understand the complete structure of the striated muscle sarcomere.
Striated muscles produce movement in every animal. The sarcomere is the repeating unit of striated muscle. Thus to understand how muscles work, we need to understand the structure and function of a single sarcomere. Muscle contraction occurs when actin filaments slide past myosin filaments towards the centre of the sarcomere due to the cyclic interactions of myosin crossbridges on the actin filaments. These filaments are arranged on regular lattices in the sarcomere. The M-band (or M-line) maintains the myosin filaments in a hexagonal lattice and the Z-band (or Z-line) maintains the actin filaments in a tetragonal lattice. We study the 3D structure of these components in order to understand their role in the contraction of muscle. The main techniques that we use are electron microscopy, electron tomography and image processing.
Further information on our sarcomeres work can be found on our website http://www.sarcomere.org/
Luther Lab, 25 June 2010
At the Molecular Medicine Picnic in Hyde Park. From left: Pradeep Luther, Oday Salim, Tariq Lewis, Jonathan Worboys, Anupama Vydyanath, Vincent Chung, Ivana Bubevska. Anupama is a post-doctoral Research Fellow working on structure of human cardiac muscle with MyBP-C mutations and Oday is final year PhD student working on electron tomography of vertebrate muscle M-band. Tariq, Vincent and Ivana are MSci Physics students and Jonathan is BSc Biology who have all completed their final year projects in our lab.
