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BRAMA, July 3, 2000, 9:00am EST
"Huxley-Zahalak Equation" Honors WU Engineer
George I. Zahalak, professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering, has received a singular honor: a fundamental equation in the molecular theory of muscle contraction has been named the Huxley-Zahalak Equation, for him and Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley.
Authors Marcello Epstein and Walter Herzog named the equation for Huxley and Zahalak in their book, Theoretical Models of Skeletal Muscle: Biological and Mathematical Considerations (John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1998).
Huxley shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1963 for work he did with collaborators the transmission of neural signals. Zahalak says Huxley is perhaps best known in biomedical and engineering sciences for the Hodgkin-Huxley Equations, which made possible a detailed quantitative understanding of neural conduction based on sound biophysical data.
"For the last 40 years, Huxley has concentrated on the molecular mechanisms of muscle contraction and published a first version of his mathematical theory in a now-classic paper in 1957," Zahalak says. "That paper contained a simplified version that is valid only for steady-state conditions, whereas the equation to which they appended my name holds for arbitrary, time-varying conditions."
The Huxley-Zahalak Equation models quantitatively the interaction between the proteins actin and myosin; this interaction is the basis for the mechanical work of skeletal muscle and other tissues.
Zahalak said that he uses the equation in simplified form in an undergraduate biomedical engineering course in quantitative physiology; graduate students get a more extensive discussion of it in a course on muscle mechanics and contractility.
Quoted with permission from:
Washington University Magazine and Alumni News
Washington University in St. Louis, MO.
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