Key result
Long-range crystallinity in insect flight muscle largely coincides with insect orders with asynchronous muscle operation, suggesting demand for skillful flight drives lattice structure regularity.
Long-range myofibrillar crystallinity in insect flight muscle evolved primarily in orders with asynchronous muscle operation, likely driven by the demand for skillful flight.
Extends evolutionary insights on insect muscle lattices; leaves open any relevance to vertebrate cardiac myofibrillar organization.
Insect flight muscle is known for its crystal-quality regularity of contractile protein arrangement within a sarcomere. We have previously shown by X-ray microdiffraction that the crystal-quality regularity in bumble-bee flight muscle is not confined within a sarcomere, but extends over the entire length of a myofibril (>1000 sarcomeres connected in series). Because of this, the whole myofibril may be regarded as a millimetre-long, natural single protein crystal. Using bright X-ray beams from a synchrotron radiation source, we examined how this long-range crystallinity has evolved among winged insects. We analysed >4600 microdiffraction patterns of quick-frozen myofibrils from 50 insect species, covering all the major winged insect orders. The results show that the occurrence of such long-range crystallinity largely coincides with insect orders with asynchronous muscle operation. However, a few of the more skilled fliers among lower-order insects apparently have developed various degrees of structural regularity, suggesting that the demand for skillful flight has driven the lattice structure towards increased regularity.
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Iwamoto et al. (2005) studied Insect flight muscle crystallinity (n=50). Asynchronous muscle operation vs. Synchronous muscle operation (lower-order insects) was evaluated on Occurrence of long-range crystallinity. Long-range crystallinity in insect flight muscle largely coincides with insect orders with asynchronous muscle operation, suggesting demand for skillful flight drives lattice structure regularity.
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