Filament overlap affects TnC extraction from skinned muscle fibres.

Recent studies on calcium regulation of muscle contraction selectively extract troponin C (TnC) from skinned skeletal muscle fibres with a low ionic strength rigor solution containing a Ca2+/Mg2+ chelator. As previous results from this laboratory and others demonstrate a crossbridge effect, especially rigor, on many of the properties of TnC, the effects of filament overlap on TnC extraction from skinned rabbit psoas muscle fibres were investigated. Tension-pCa relationships at a sarcomere length of 2.7 microns were determined before and after a 5 min TnC extraction at sarcomere lengths of 2.3, 2.5, 2.7, 3.1, 3.3 or 3.5 microns with 20 mM Tris, pH 7.8, 5 mM EDTA. The decrease in the post-extraction maximum Ca2+ activated tension, an indicator of the amount of TnC extracted, was linearly related to the overlap of the thick and thin filaments with decreases in tension being associated with a decrease in filament overlap. The smaller fibre diameter at the longer sarcomere length could facilitate diffusion of TnC from fibre segments. However, the wide range of measured diameters, 40-120 microns, accounted for only 14% of the observed tension decrement and shrinking the fibre with polyvinylpyrrolidone did not increase the tension decrement. Increasing the sarcomere length before extraction was also found to decrease the TnC content of fibre segments along with the post-extraction maximum tension. Thus, TnC appears to be preferentially extracted from non-overlap than overlap regions of the sarcomere. These results further indicate that rigor crossbridges affect TnC other than through increased Ca2+ binding and that under the conditions used here, they retard its extraction.