Faculty

Kevin Conley
Professor (Radiology)
Ph.D. Zoology
University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1983
Office phone: (206) 543-3763
kconley@u.washington.edu

Community of Science page

 

DESIGN OF MUSCLE

How is muscle designed to accomplish tasks as diverse as locomotion and sound production? How is cellular metabolism integrated with contractile properties to accomplish such a variety of activities? The goal of my group is to determine how the properties and metabolic organization of muscle are designed to accomplish these tasks.

Muscle is well suited for investigating questions of the design of cellular metabolism for a number of reasons. First, muscle can be studied over the full metabolic range of the tissue from rest to the ATP synthesis capacity. This permits us to study the control of metabolic pathways generating ATP and how they are integrated with ATP demand. Second, muscles are quite variable in their properties and we use this natural variation among muscles as an experimental tool. For example, we ask how the processes and integration of ATP supply and demand differ in the extremely fast, sustained contractions (90 Hz) of the rattlesnake tailshaker muscle as compared with the slower contractions (3-5 Hz) of human muscles. Third, muscle is adaptable to need. We use the plasticity of metabolic and contractile properties of muscle to probe the organization of cellular metabolism. Finally, we use many tools to study muscle, ranging from non-invasive magnetic resonance to probe cellular energetics in vivo to electron microscopy of muscle tissue to quantify cellular architecture. The end result is a series of tools and questions that allow us to evaluate how muscle properties and the integration of ATP supply with demand determine muscle function.