The osmotic behavior of frog sartorius muscles

✍ Scribed by Steinbach, H. B.

• Publisher: Wiley (John Wiley & Sons)
• Year: 1944
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 449 KB
• Volume: 24
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0095-9898
• DOI: 10.1002/jcp.1030240309

✦ Synopsis

Frog skeletal muscles, isolated from the body, will swell when immersed in dilute salt solutions and shrink in concentrated. I n general, the behavior suggests the presence of a simple semipermeable membrane plus a rather large fraction of "osmotically inactive space.'' Recent studies have shown that the frog muscle is by no means impermeable to the salts of the external medium and hence a series of experiments was designed to determine the electrolyte contents of muscles that have reached apparent equilibrium weights in solutions of known osmotic pressure. Since sodium and potassium comprise the greatest fraction of the cations of the tissue the sum of these two elements was used as a measure of the electrolyte content of the muscle. Chloride was also determined in most instances.

'Aided by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.