Intensity Fluctuation Autocorrelation Studies of Resting and Contracting Frog Sartorius Muscle

The development of the continuous wave laser, self-beating spectroscopy, and photon correlation techniques have made it possible to study the microscopic dynamics of a system by observing the fluctuations in the intensity of coherent light scattered by the system. This technique has already found applications in molecular biology in measuring the diffusion constants of several viruses and various macromolecules. We have developed light-beat techniques and used them in our laboratory to study myosin and its self-association (Herbert and Carlson, 1971) and to study TMV (Cummins et al., 1969). Fujime (1970) and Fujime and Ishiwata (1971) reported its use in the study of F-actin and its interaction with tropomyosin and troponin. In this paper we present the results of some preliminary studies of intensity fluctuation autocorrelations obtained from coherent light scattered from resting and contracting muscle. The experiments reported here provide a survey of intensity fluctuation autocorrelations of muscle. Systematic and...