Muscle Responses and EMG in Animals

Flat or Needle Electrodes and a PowerLab, the electrical activity of muscle groups can easily be studied. Your students can quantify the amount of electrical activity in the muscle by setting a channel to integrate the raw EMG signal online. They can also determine the standard deviation of the raw EMG signal to provide a quantitative measure of muscle activation over short time intervals. Students can use Headphones to listen to EMG "sounds".

Scope software is best suited for making recordings of evoked EMG signals. Data can be easily exported from Scope and imported into a number of software programs including LabChart. The data can be easily exported from Scope and imported into LabChart for analysis. To analyze a complex wave pattern such as an EMG, your students can perform a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) using the Spectrum window in LabChart. The resulting frequency spectrum indicates the strength of each frequency in the observed EMG wave.

With an integrated stimulator in the PowerLab, students can provide electrical stimulation to the muscle to study twitching, recruitment and tetanus fatigue. An experiment on the amphibian muscle is available from the Experiments section, whilst additional experiments on muscular structures such as the mammalian diaphragm and toad rectus muscle are listed on the Teaching Resources Website.

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