Dear Gayoan,

I think the only reasons to choose wastus lateralis is that this muscle is closer to human one in terms of respiratory capacity and control function, as reported by the paper below:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/expphysiol.2012.070037/full

Nevrtheless several muscle laboratory use EDL tas well o isolate single fibers, easy to catch, resistant and very long.

Best wishes

  Cesare

Dear Cesare，

Thanks you for your reply.

Sincerely,

Gaoyan

Dear Gayoan, I guess that as mentioned by Ceseare the choice is probably due to aim of being closer to human VL, maybe also in terms of fiber type composition. After that you may need to have more  "pure" type fiber preparations, or of easy acess and you could chose EDL, Soleus or FDB muscles.

Best regards

Elsia

Dear Elisa，

Thank you！

Sincerely,

Gaoyan

Dear Gayoan!

Your question is not completely correct. You, probably, mean only human muscle research while there were and are lots of studies on single muscle fibres from frogs, rabbits, rodents, etc where researchers traditionally use fibres from different muscles like sartorius, semimembranosus, semitendinosus, psoas and EDL depending on the task. Most classical studies of muscle were done on these muscles.

Cheers,

Sergey

Dear Gayoan,

I think it's very simple—the VL is big and easy to get a biopsy from with very little risk of injury.  This is the key muscle for human research primarily for that reason.  The human fiber type argument is weak.  Look at our paper regarding human fiber types and you will see that all of these muscles are pretty slow:

Human skeletal muscle biochemical diversity.

Tirrell TF, Cook MS, Carr JA, Lin E, Ward SR, Lieber RL.

J Exp Biol. 2012 Aug 1;215(Pt 15):2551-9. doi: 10.1242/jeb.069385. Erratum in: J Exp Biol. 2012 Aug 1;215(Pt 15):2931.  PMID: 22786631

I hope that helps.

Rick

Dear Sergey，

Thank you for your answer, yeah, my question is for the human research. Lots of conclusions are given by doing the researches only the the vastus lateralis,thus I am confused. 

Sincerely,

Gaoyan

Dear Rick,

Thank you for your answer and the paper.

Sincerely,

Gaoyan

Dear all,

Thank you very much for your attention. For this question:

1.As the invasive nature of skeletal muscle experiments,it is easier to get VL as a large muscle 

2.VL is an important muscle during exercise and something else

3.Human muscle types are pretty slow ,the difference of muscle types is week.

so it has a good representiveness in research.

Am I right?

You got it!