ABSTRACT
Environmental variables are often used to investigate reaction rates and kinetics of cellular and subcellular processes in order to understand adaptational plasticity of organisms in terms of migratory activity and metabolism. In fact, temperature is often considered a more ubiquitous parameter that affects cellular performance. Muscle contraction involves the coordinated activation of contractile proteins that are arranged in a highly linear array in skeletal muscle. A muscle cell—muscle fibre—consists of parallel bundles of myofibrils that are surrounded by mitochondria, cytoplasm and the sarcoplasmic reticulum which acts as an internal Ca2+ store. The elementary structural repetitive unit of a muscle fibre is the sarcomere. The functional elementary unit was found to be the half-sarcomere rather than the sarcomere. A sarcomere is composed of two half-sarcomeres of opposite orientation regarding the resulting pulling trajectory of the contractile proteins, actin and myosin.
