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(between Li-Qun Zhang’s Lab at RIC and Shu Liu’s Lab in BME)
Changes of muscle fiber mechanical properties such as tension and stiffness play important roles in pathologic changes in neurological disorders. Currently, it is not clear about the underlying mechanisms at the fiber and sarcomere levels for clinical symptoms like flaccidity, spasticity, contracture, and muscle weakness. It is not clear whether spastic fibers are under higher tension and whether sarcomeres in spastic muscles adapt to potentially increased tension by adding sarcomeres in series as normal muscles do under stretching. There is a lack of quantitative methods to evaluate muscle fiber tension and imaging in vivo. This collaborative project aims at developing a novel force microscope and determine in vivo muscle fiber tension and stress and microscopic imaging, and to determine changes of fiber tension, sarcomere length and number of sarcomeres in series in a stroke mouse model to gain insights into the mechanisms underlying muscle flaccidity, spasticity, contracture, weakness, and motor impairments. The force microscope can potentially be applied to other biomedical applications to investigate soft tissue biomechanics in vivo.
