muscles tagged posts

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...

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...