Scientific Instruments Heidelberg

The Fibermic muscle research system is primarily designed to be placed on an existing inverted microscope from ZEISS or OLYMPUS so it can be combined with optical recordings of your choosing or . Its primary use is intact living muscle preparations but it can also be used for skinned fibers. It combines the versatility of the KG transducer series with a very small compact footprint perfusion cuvette system with optical widows. Because the system can also be used for skinned preparations, it provides one platform that spans a wide range of muscle physiology experimenst. The microscope can be equipped with our photometers and the system comes standard with our linear motor. The perfusion cuvette is temperature controlled.

KEY FEATURES:

• Mechanically stable platform for combining advanced mechanical & optical muscle studies
• Complete turnkey system with data recording & analysis available. Data can be combined with calcium or sarcomere measurements from the microscope system.
• Cuvette system of your choice can be closed or open for easy access
• Heat control is standard between 30-42C.
• Standard equipped with linear motor for muscle length perturbation studies
• Expandable with a stimulator & tetanizer for intact muscle stimulation
• Expandable with a photometer for the microscope to allow intracellular calcium studies or use your own imaging system.
• Expandable with laser controlled perfusion system for highly accurate low force measurements

KEY EXPERIMENTS / MUSCLE Parameters:

1)      Measure intact muscle responses to electrical stimulation or tetanus. Measure myomechanical properties of contracting and relaxing muscle strips. An ergometer can be used to perform after-loaded contractions in heart muscle and to perform eccentric contractions. background information

2)      Twitch amplitude and kinetics analysis, time to peak, (50%) relaxation velocities, starling curve, diastolic force development with Software Muscledata..

3)      A linear motor plus control units can be adapted to measure mechanical muscle properties such as Slack-test, Isotonic release, Constant velocity release, Stretch release, vibration, eccentric and after-loaded contractions (intact muscle) background information

Instrument Control can be via hardware Motor Action Control Panel so you can use your own data acquisition system and software or via our integrated package DAS/MuscleData that controls all hardware and records all muscle data and optical recordings.