Students need to be able to demonstrate:

• An appreciation of the basic structure & function of the skeletal, cardiac and smooth muscle. This will be facilitated by a histology practical associated with the lecture series.
• A mechanistic understanding of the resting and action potentials.
• Awareness of the basic properties and function of ligand-gated and voltage-gated ion channels.
• Awareness of the distinction between ligand-gated (or 'ligand-operated') channels and modulation of channels by ligands acting on G-protein coupled receptors (the latter is covered by Dr. Rutter in element 4).
• An ability to describe the principal events that occur at the pre- and post-junctional membranes during excitatory synaptic transmission (using the NMJ by way of an example).
• That they to recognise and understand the intracellular organisation of striated muscle to include myofibrils, sarcomeres (to include the banding pattern and the major filaments), t-tubules, sarcoplasmic reticulum, triads etc.
• An ability to describe the sequence of events that couple excitation of the NMJ to Ca release from the SR. This should include an appreciation of the essential difference between skeletal and cardiac muscle.
• An ability to describe the structure and function of actin, myosin, tropomyosin and troponin & titin in relation to the regulation of contraction of striated muscle. Students should be aware of how this scheme differs from that seen in smooth muscle.
• An abilty to recognise the different types of skeletal muscle (slow, intermediate and fast) and associated each with the essential properties of that muscle type i.e. Speed of twitch (related to myosin ATPase Vmax), myoglobin content, vascularisation, reliance on oxidative metabolism.
• A basic understanding of muscle mechanics, length tension curves (for muscle and sarcomere), velocity load curves.
• A basic understanding of structure, function and distribution of smooth muscles at tissue (unitary and multiunitary) and cellular levels (lack of striations, sarcoplasmic reticulum, dense bodies, gap junctions and syncitial nature).
• Basic understanding of the control of contraction in smooth muscles by comparison to striated muscle (actin based verses myosin based regulation). Consideration of levels of control ranging from intrinsic (myogenic but including ICCs), through endocrine/paracrine to enteric NS and finally to ANS.