Sliding filament theory

The sliding filament theory is a widely accepted explanation of the mechanism that underlies muscle contraction.

[7] In 1939 a Russian husband and wife team Vladimir Alexandrovich Engelhardt and Militsa Nikolaevna Lyubimova discovered that myosin had an enzymatic (called ATPase) property that can break down ATP to release energy.

[10] But the notion was generally opposed, even from the likes of Nobel laureates such as Otto Fritz Meyerhof and Archibald Hill, who adhered to the prevailing dogma that myosin was a structural protein and not a functional enzyme.

[15] Andrew Huxley, whom Alan Hodgkin described as "wizard with scientific apparatus", had just discovered the mechanism of the nerve impulse (action potential) transmission (for which he and Hodgkin later won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1963) in 1949 using his own design of voltage clamp, and was looking for an associate who could properly dissect out muscle fibres.

[16] Upon recommendation of a close friend Robert Stämpfli, a German physician Rolf Niedergerke joined him at the University of Cambridge in 1952.

[17] Huxley recollected that at the time the only person who ever thought of sliding filaments before 1953 was Dorothy Hodgkin (later winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry).

[2] The sliding filament theory was born from two consecutive papers published on the 22 May 1954 issue of Nature under the common theme "Structural Changes in Muscle During Contraction".

The first paper, written by Andrew Huxley and Rolf Niedergerke, is titled "Interference microscopy of living muscle fibres".

According to them:[4] The second paper, by Hugh Huxley and Jean Hanson, is titled "Changes in the cross-striations of muscle during contraction and stretch and their structural interpretation".

[23] He obtained the actual molecular arrangement of the filaments using X-ray crystallography by teaming up with Kenneth Holmes, who was trained by Rosalind Franklin, in 1965.

[25] At the conference, as Koscak Maruyama later recalled, Hanson had to answer the criticisms by shouting, "I know I cannot explain the mechanism yet, but the sliding is a fact.

[2]) He published his theory in the 20 June 1969 issue of Science under the title "The Mechanism of Muscular Contraction".