ArticleRoyal Society open science2016
Force per cross-sectional area from molecules to muscles: a general property of biological motors.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 66 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Hamstring muscle activation strategies during eccentric contractions are related to the distribution of muscle damage.Scandinavian journal of medicine & science in sports · 2022Article
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- Plasticity of the gastrocnemius elastic system in response to decreased work and power demand during growth.The Journal of experimental biology · 2021Article
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- Quantal biomechanical effects in speech postures of the lips.Journal of neurophysiology · 2020Article
- Scaling of inertial delays in terrestrial mammals.PloS one · 2020Article
- Intramuscular injection of skeletal muscle derived extracellular matrix mitigates denervation atrophy after sciatic nerve transection.Journal of tissue engineeringArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We propose to formally extend the notion of specific tension, i.e. force per cross-sectional area-classically used for muscles, to quantify forces in molecular motors exerting various biological functions. In doing so, we review and compare the maximum tensions exerted by about 265 biological motors operated by about 150 species of different taxonomic groups. The motors considered range from single molecules and motile appendages of microorganisms to whole muscles of large animals. We show that specific tensions exerted by molecular and non-molecular motors follow similar statistical distributions, with in particular, similar medians and (logarithmic) means. Over the 10(19) mass (M) range of the cell or body from which the motors are extracted, their specific tensions vary as M(α) with α not significantly different from zero. The typical specific tension found in most motors is about 200 kPa, which generalizes to individual molecular motors and microorganisms a classical property of macroscopic muscles. We propose a basic order-of-magnitude interpretation of this result.
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