Hi everybody,
I am not aware of what you want to sort of studies you want to do with
your frozen muscle tissues. But I agree, that you surely have problems
with muscle contraction before freezing.
I do not have experience with skeletal muscle, however I do have
experience with cardiac muscle. You have the same problems with
hypercontraction of the muscle if you f.ex. want to make muscle strips or
isolate single cells from fresh tissue. So what you can do to immediately
block muscle contraction is to use a solution of 2,3-butanedione
2-monoxime (BDM), this instantly blocks contraction. It works for cardiac
muscle (just putting the piece of tissue into this solution). There is a
huge amount of literature on this subject, because this additive is used
(experimentally at the moment) in storage solutions for cardiac
transplants. May be you know that the major problem with cardiac
transplants is that hearts hypercontract within 6 or 8 hours after
explantation, so it is not possible to store human hearts for a longer
period (like kidneys).
If you are interested in the literature you may just go to medline and
search for BDM and transplantation, or I could give you more information
on this subject. I investigated the effects of BDM as additive in a
storage solution on human explanted hearts on several enzyme activities.

I hope this helps.

Dr. Heike Grabsch
Dep. of Pathology
University of Duesseldorf
Germany