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24 - Energy provision and contractile proteins in non-muscular functions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2010

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Summary

Let us turn now for a while, in closing this story of the development of ideas concerning the nature of muscle contraction and the pathways of energy provision for it, to survey certain wider horizons which have come into view. In 1933 Hopkins (4), in his presidential address to the British Association, after briefly referring to the sequence of chemical events (as understood at that time) which led up to the mechanical response, continued:

It may be noted as an illustration of the unity of life that the processes which occur in the living yeast cell in its dealings with sugars are closely similar to those which proceed in living muscle. In the earlier stages they are identical and we know now where they part company… I have chosen the case of muscle, and it must serve as my only example, but many such related and ordered reactions have been studied in other tissues, from bacteria to the brain. Some prove general, some more special. Although we are far from possessing a complete picture in any one case we are beginning in thought to fit not a few pieces together. We are on a line safe for progress.

And in conversation he was wont to emphasise the outstanding suitability of muscle as the material for studies on energy relationships, just because in this tissue it was easier to make quantitative measurements of the energy changes involved; he was confident that the relevance of such results to the behaviour of other tissues would in time emerge.

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Machina Carnis
The Biochemistry of Muscular Contraction in its Historical Development
, pp. 578 - 598
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1971

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