Load sharing between synergistic muscles characterized by a ligand-binding approach and elastography.

The skeletal muscle contraction is determined by cross-bridge formation between the myosin heads and the actin active sites. When the muscle contracts, it shortens, increasing its longitudinal shear elastic modulus ([Formula: see text]). Structurally, skeletal muscle can be considered analogous to the molecular receptors that form receptor-ligand complexes and exhibit specific ligand-binding dynamics.

Surface wave elastography is a reliable method to correlate muscle elasticity, torque, and electromyography activity level.

The shear elastic modulus is one of the most important parameters to characterize the mechanical behavior of soft tissues. In biomechanics, ultrasound elastography is the gold standard for measuring and mapping it locally in skeletal muscle in vivo. However, their applications are limited to the laboratory or clinic.

Analysis of the transient surface wave propagation in soft-solid elastic plates.

In dynamic elastography, the goal is to estimate the Young's modulus from audio-frequency wave propagation in soft-tissues. Within this frequency range, the shear wavelength is centimeter-sized while the compressional wavelength is meter-sized. Thus, the experimental data are usually collected in the near-field of the source.

Loss-of-function mutations in the Nav1.7 gene underlie congenital indifference to pain in multiple human populations.

Congenital indifference to pain (CIP) is a rare condition in which patients have severely impaired pain perception, but are otherwise essentially normal. We identified and collected DNA from individuals from nine families of seven different nationalities in which the affected individuals meet the diagnostic criteria for CIP. Using homozygosity mapping and haplotype sharing methods, we narrowed the CIP locus to chromosome 2q24-q31, a region known to contain a cluster of voltage-gated sodium channel genes.