<i>In situ</i> Muscle Function and Lengthening Contraction.

<p>(A) Schematic representation of the lengthening contraction protocol, designed to assess the muscles resistance to contraction-induced injury. TA muscles from both LARGE transgenics (line 126) and wild-type controls were subjected to series of lengthening contractions and the effect on force generation was measured. (B) In two month old mice there was a significant effect of the number of eccentric contractions on force drop, however, there was no significant difference between LARGE transgenic mice (n = 6) and their non-transgenic littermates (n = 4). (C) In contrast in 8 month old mice the number of eccentric contractions had significant effects on the force drop (p = 0.04 and <0.001, respectively). There was no difference between LARGE transgenic mice (n = 4) and their negative littermates (n = 4) when the number of eccentric contractions was less than 5, but there were significant differences between LARGE transgenic and wild-type mice at 5, 6, 7 and 8 eccentric contractions (p = 0.01, 0.0007, <0.0001 and <0.0001 respectively). All values presented are mean and standard error of the mean (S.E.M).