Luciano Pavarotti, eat your heart out: A homely singing fish can sustain a note--an A-flat--for more than an hour. And something fishy in the creature's sound-producing muscles could help explain a rare human disease.
CREDIT: KUAN WANG/NIAMS/NIH
The male midshipman drums on its swim bladder with specially adapted muscles to generate a hum resembling the chant of a Tibetan monk. To figure out how the fish sings for so long, biologist Kuan Wang of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues used x-ray and electron microscopy and magnetic resonance imaging to analyze the muscles. To their surprise they found that within the muscle cells, stripes of protein known as Z bands were extraordinarily wide, Wang reported 15 December at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco, California. In fact, the bands closely resemble those found in patients with nemaline myopathy, a congenital disorder characterized by weak and uncontrollable muscles.
If researchers can figure out how the fish's Z bands got so chunky, they might gain insight into the disease, Wang says. But others are cautious. Studies of the fish should help explain how Z bands are put together, says H. Lee Sweeney, a physiologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, but "it's less clear whether it will help us understand the pathogenesis" of nemaline myopathy.
