Tensile Testing: The Elastic Properties
of Different Muscle Tissues
Name: Robert I. Mozia
Class: BE 210
The purpose of this experiment is to use tensile testing to determine the Young’s modulus of both skeletal muscle and cardiac muscle at high strain rates. The moduli will then be compared to each other to determine if one is significantly different from the other.
It is hypothesized that the Young’s modulus of cardiac muscle will be less than that of skeletal muscle at high strain rates, because cardiac muscle is specialized to withstand very strong contractions. The result of this specialized structure, however, is a reduction of myosin, and thus MLC II light chains, in the structure of a typical cardiac muscle sarcomere.2 Since Young’s modulus is a measure that describes stiffness, a lower modulus of high strain rates would be indicative of a muscles structure which contains more cross-linked structures and less myosin. This material property would serve as further conformation that cardiac muscles have fewer MLC II groups than skeletal muscles. This would also illustrate how characterizing the material properties of biological tissue through tensile testing lends further credibility to the classification of the amounts and uses of proteins in different tissues by other techniques, such as electrophoresis.