I really enjoyed professor Ellerby’s talk on muscles and movement in conjunction with the great exercise we got from the NIA routine! It was fun to see many different techniques from martial art, dance and mindfulness be combined into a both fun and intense session. First learning how our muscles contract and generate force through the filamented structures of myosin and actin, and how the cross-bridge cycle works, brought the hour of dance into light for me, Through this, I was very aware of my own muscles contracting and relaxing, and balancing and stabilizing my body, throughout the routine. The molecular level of generating muscle power struck me as an interesting comparison to the molecular level of prion misfolding. In contrast to muscle power which is generated in a cyclical process, PrPSc’ spreading is spontaneous and not driven my chemicals.
In my dance I cooperated with Clara to express my choreography. I wanted to express the change from alpha helices into beta sheets, and thus choreographed a sequence where we are first entwined in our own spirals, dancing around each other and spinning to represent the alpha helices. Then I am spontaneously transformed into a beta sheet as PrPc is changed into PrPsc, and as I grab onto Clara, we are both turned into Beta sheets, as shown in our stillness and connected hands. I chose to not have more dancers come in to show how the chemical structure of the amino acids of the prion does not change, but rather the arrangement of the polypeptide chains.