Ewen Callaway in Nature:
Since the 1950s, scientists have had a pretty good idea of how muscles work. The protein at the centre of the action is myosin, a molecular motor that ratchets itself along rope-like strands of actin proteins — grasping, pulling, releasing and grasping again — to make muscle cells contract.
The basics were first explained in a pair of landmark papers in Nature1,2, and they have been confirmed and elaborated on by detailed molecular maps of myosin and its partners. Researchers think that myosin generates force by cocking back the long lever-like arm that is attached to the motor portion of the protein.
The only hitch is that scientists had never seen this fleeting pre-stroke state — until now.
In a preprint published in January3, researchers used a cutting-edge structural biology technique to record this moment, which lasts just milliseconds in living cells.
More here.