• Organize it around a question
  • develop a strong hypothesis with good intellectual content potential
  • Look up background information in your book about the physiological mechanisms you are interested in and what is already known about them
• Design the experiment thinking about the best treatments and controls to isolate your factors of interest
• Think about potential outcomes and their implications – if you get pattern A it will mean X, if you get pattern B, it will mean Y, etc.
• Can you foresee any issues in coming to clear conclusions?
  • You might want to strengthen your hypothesis or adjust your experimental design
• Think about potential to develop your intellectual content by highlighting your hypothesis through the introduction, methods, results, and discussion — given your hypothesis, what are important points to hit?
• Maximize your intellectual merit by writing to convince the reader that your study is important, useful and compelling.

We will explore the contractile properties of skeletal muscle in the next two labs. For Lab 8, you will follow the protocol and experiments listed below (Parts 1-6) and submit a group lab, and for Lab 9 you will do an independent experiment and writeup.  

Be thinking about what you might explore further and come up with a good testable hypothesis for your independent lab.  Get your independent hypothesis approved by your TA before you leave lab this week (see manual for more details).

Download the lab here

Lab 7-8 Toad Muscle Protocol

Here are some resources:

• Thigh and Shank muscles of the frog
• Ventral musculature (superficial)
• Dorsal musculature (superficial)
• Thigh and Shank muscles (another one)

For background, please watch the podcast on Muscle EMG — especially the motor control portion toward the end, and check out the reading:

Eckert ch. 10 (under the readings tab):  Mechanics of Muscle Contraction 375-379, Active State, Twitch and Tetanus 391- 392, Motor Control vertebrate 410 – 411

This is a group lab

Lab 6 protocol download

lab-6-emg-lab-protocol

This lab is very cool, we will be isolating the sciatic nerve to observe refractory periods and conduction velocity.

Download Lab 10

Toad Muscle and Nerve Dissection Guide

Please review the podcasts and notes from when we discussed nerves in class.

Look for discussion of Neuron Structure and Compound Action Potentials in the Synapses and Signal Propagation podcast at around 24:00.

Look for discussion of Refractory period in the Neurons podcast at around 23:00.