Venus (501) Meeting 3

In this meeting, we discussed and reviewed the information we had collected regarding muscle cells and their membrane potentials, and we thought of ideas for our nanomachine design. Through our research, we all had a better understanding of how the potential in the muscle cells works. We learned that an action potential is sent down a motor neuron to the axon terminal where vesicles release acetylcholine. The acetylcholine then binds to receptors on the muscle fiber membrane, which opens up the sodium channels. This allows the sodium to diffuse into the cell and potassium to diffuse out creating an action potential. This action potential sweeps down the cell membrane opening up more sodium channels. After the action potential has passed, the sodium channels close and the resting potential is restored. With this knowledge we could then begin designing a device specifically aimed at restoring and regulating the membrane potential in skeletal muscle cells.

The first thing we decided on regarding our device was that our design would be much more meaningful if it had a focus. We chose our focus to be the disease Myasthenia Gravis because we thought it would be neat to not only have a device that could regulate the membrane potential in muscle cells, but one that could possibly help people suffering from this disease. Myasthenia Gravis is a disease in which the muscle membrane is lacking acetylcholine receptors because the membrane has been distorted from its original folded shape and because of the presence of antibodies. This makes the membrane less sensitive to acetylcholine and thus makes it less likely that a nerve impulse will cause an action potential in the muscle.

After much brainstorming, our team thought up three initial ideas for our design. The first idea is to have tubes that would be inserted into the membrane to act as more channels for the sodium to diffuse into the cell. These tubes would open when the existing channels were activated. Our second idea is to have a pump outside each (or one) of the existing channels that would pump the needed amount of sodium into the cell to create the action potential. Our final idea is to re-create the protein channels, encapsulate them in a myselle and have them fuse into the membrane to form more channels. Also, we thought we could use the carbohydrates that are attached to membrane proteins as a location mechanism or a binding site. Lastly, we came up with a catchy way to introduce the presentation of our device design, but it will be kept a secret. For our next meeting, we are going to do more research on the disease and on each of our ideas, so we can pick the best one.