muscles tagged posts

When Muscles Work Out, they Help Neurons to Grow

Two textured green balls have a purple center.
Caption:In response to biochemical and physical cues of exercise, motor neurons (in purple) exhibit new growth (in green) faster than neurons that experience no exercise-induced cues.
Credits:Credit: Angel Bu

The findings suggest that biochemical and physical effects of exercise could help heal nerves. There’s no doubt that exercise does a body good. Regular activity not only strengthens muscles but can bolster our bones, blood vessels, and immune system.

Now, MIT engineers have found that exercise can also have benefits at the level of individual neurons. They observed that when muscles contract during exercise, they release a soup of biochemical signals called myokines...

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Learning from the Bears

Grizzly bears’ muscles manage to survive hibernation virtually unharmed. Researchers are trying to understand the mechanisms behind this ability in order to help bedridden patients.
© Gotthardt Lab, MDC

Grizzly bears spend many months in hibernation, but their muscles do not suffer from the lack of movement. In the journal Scientific Reports, a team led by Michael Gotthardt reports on how they manage to do this. The grizzly bears’ strategy could help prevent muscle atrophy in humans as well.

A grizzly bear only knows three seasons during the year. Its time of activity starts between March and May. Around September the bear begins to eat large quantities of food. And sometime between November and January, it falls into hibernation...

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Scientists have devised a way to develop Bigger, Stronger Muscle Fibers on Gelatin

Skeletal myotubes grown for three weeks on gelatin hydrogel. Credit: Archana Bettadapur, Gio Suh, Evelyn Wang, Holly Huber, Alyssa Viscio and Megan McCain

Skeletal myotubes grown for three weeks on gelatin hydrogel. Credit: Archana Bettadapur, Gio Suh, Evelyn Wang, Holly Huber, Alyssa Viscio and Megan McCain

Muscles-on-a-chip could be used to study muscle development and disease, as well as provide a relevant testing ground for new potential drugs. During normal embryonic development, skeletal muscles form when myoblasts fuse to form muscle fibers, myotubes. In past experiments, mouse myotubes have detached or delaminated from protein-coated plastic scaffolds after approximately one week and failed to thrive.

In this experiment, the researchers fabricated a gel scaffold from gelatin, a derivative of the naturally occurring muscle protein collagen, and achieved much better results...

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