M. Wick1
The Ohio State University Department of Animal Sciences
Meat is the edible muscle tissue of animals. The sarcomere is the fundamental functional unit of muscle. Growth and development of muscle is the result of the highly ordered accretion and assembly of the constituent proteins in the sarcomere. Primary amino-acid-sequence elements of the constitutive proteins carry the information necessary for determining the final architecture of the sarcomere. The mechanisms by which the constitutive proteins are assembled and function together to form the sarcomere and produce muscle contraction are just now beginning to be understood.
The predominant protein in the sarcomere, found in the thick filament system, is myosin. In physiological buffers, purified myosin spontaneously assembles into a synthetic thick filament with a dramatic resemblance to the native thick filament. Some of the amino-acid-sequence elements contributing to myosin’s assembly properties may also be critical to myosin’s solubility functions that are so crucial to the manufacture of high-quality prepared-meat products. This paper, written in August 1998, was presented to the symposium on cell biology at the 56th Annual Meeting of the Poultry Science Association, Pennsylvania State University, and summarizes recent experimental results contributing to our understanding of the mechanism of sarcomeric muscle myosin assembly.
1 For more information, contact at: The Ohio State University, 126 Vivian Hall, 2121 Fyffe Road, Columbus, OH 43210, 614-688-3018, Fax 614-292-0218, e-mail: wick.13@osu.edu