Junctional sarcoplasmic reticulum (JSR) in all its forms (extended JSR, JSR of couplings, corbular SR) in both skeletal and cardiac muscle is always located at the Z - I regions of the sarcomeres. The Z tubule is a tubule of the free SR (non-specialized SR) which is consistently located at the Z lines in cardiac muscle (1). Short connections between JSR and Z lines have been described (2), and bundles of filaments at Z lines have been seen in skeletal (3) and cardiac (4) muscle. In opossum cardiac muscle, we have seen bundles of 10 nm filaments stretching across interfibrillary spaces and adjacent myofibrils with extensions to the plasma- lemma in longitudinal (Fig. 1) and transverse (Fig. 2) sections. Only an occasional single filament is seen elsewhere along a sarcomere. We propose that these filaments represent anchor fibers that maintain the observed invariant topography of the free SR and JSR throughout the contraction-relaxation cycle.
Dynamics of the Modified n-Degree Lorenz System
