Richard Tregear, Co-founder of the Journal of Muscle Research and Cell Motility

The fundamental research done by this group exploited the unique properties of the fibrillar flight muscle of the giant water bug Lethocerus.Richard's research contributions were seminal in many areas and include the first direct demonstration of stretchactivation of actomyosin ATPase (Rüegg and Tregear 1966) and the direct visualisation of rigor and relaxed crossbridges in muscle by EM and X-ray techniques (Miller and Tregear 1970;Reedy et al. 1965;Tregear and Miller 1969); this work was roughly contemporaneous with Hugh Huxley's studies but gained much less recognition.He was a modest and very thoughtful man who revelled in scientific arguments; he was closely involved in the challenges and controversies of this exciting era of muscle research.He achieved much by asking questions and motivating others to find answers rather than as an individual experimenter.Amongst the research he instigated were the demonstration that the Myosin ADP.Pi complex, predicted by in vitro kinetics, was present in muscle (Marston and Tregear 1972), that substrate binding and mechanical output were directly and reversibly coupled (Marston et al. 1979), that the proportion of myosin to actin varied between muscle