Third party funded individual grant
Start date : 01.01.2015
End date : 31.12.2016
Most skeletal muscle biomechanics studies rely on force transducer technologies involving whole muscles, muscle fibre bundles or single fibres, either intact or skinned preparations. All commercially available systems usually are desgined to cover only a fraction of possible experiments and researchers still must put strenous effort into each single experiment. Therefore, muscle research has become very selective. When performing muscle biomechanics experiments, a high degree of automation is still not avilable. We aim to combine muscle biomechanics research with biomedical engineering expertise to develop a fully-automated robotic force transducer system with modular design to study muscle biomechanics across all organ scales and to test for active and passive muscle properties. During this international collaboration, the design will be successively improved and validated during bilateral visits of the partners who are renowned experts in muscle biology and biomedical engineering. As disease entity, we will focus on a genetic mutation of a cytoskeleton protein that presents a genetic selection for high-ednurance muscle performance (ACTN3 deficiency, ‘gene of speed’).
The specific scientific goals are:
1. To engineer a fully automated muscle force transducer that is capable to allow self-contained force recordings of muscle preparations for muscle biomechanics
2. To perform muscle biomechanics (active/passive) experiments, i.e.: Caffeine induced force transients, pCa-force curves, SR-loading protocols, Resting length-tension curves, stretch-jump experiments, Slack test experiments (unloaded speed of shortening)
3. To validate our ‘MyoRobot’ system on an ACTN3 KO animal model (‘gene of speed’) to explain molecular mechanisms associated with genetic increase in muscle performance in endurance athletes (for which the model serves)
4. To optimize the automation mechatronics and include a full software control and pre-analysis program
5. To prepare translation of the ‘MyoRobot’ into commercial applicability