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Answers to Challenge Questions
Posted By: Sophia_Kapchinsky, Dr. Hawke on Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Hi everyone,
Here are the answers to Challenge Questions #7 and #8 from the Lab Team.
Challenge Question #7
Myoglobin molecules from which muscle groups will donate oxygen molecules to mitochondria when you are:
* Running
The main muscle groups used during running are found in your legs. This means that a large portion of oxyhemoglobin will travel to your legs and give up their oxygen molecules to the myoglobin in those working muscles. To be more specific, the quadriceps, hamstrings and calves would be the main users of the delivered oxygen.
* Playing basketball
When a playing a sport that involves upper body and lower body activity, we would expect to see oxygen being delivered to all active muscles throughout the body.
* Eating
This was a tricky question, because myoglobin is mainly found in skeletal muscle. When eating your body uses smooth muscle, which is found around your organs to help move food along it’s digestive path. So everyone who thought the answer was the ‘stomach muscles’ was on the right track.
Challenge Question #8
What are some of the difficulties Peter, Jesse and I may encounter when attempting to combine serial muscle cross-sections?
There are multiple challenges that can be encountered when trying to overlay pictures of two consecutive muscle sections
• The angle of two pictures can be different. This requires us to rotate (and sometimes flip) one of the images in attempts to perfectly line up the two pictures
• Sometimes a stain might develop really well on one part of the tissue and not as well on the other. If the staining inconsistencies are found on a serial section, such that, the good part of one overlays with a bad part of the other, and vise versa, both stains have to be redone.
• When attempting to combine multiple sections (for example, intramuscular fat, vasculature and myoglobin), all three serial sections need to be stained perfectly. If something goes wrong with any one of the muscle cross-sections it is impossible to make conclusions about the interactions between the three factors, and the stains would need to be redone
Everyone did a great job in trying to answer the Challenge Questions. I love seeing this type of enthusiasm and excitement in the field of science.
Keep the great work,
Sophia
Lab Team
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