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Stunning images show how muscles heal themselves after a workout - Livescience.com
Oct 16, 2021 1 min, 36 secs

Exercise leaves muscles riddled with microscopic tears, so after a rigorous workout, the control centers of muscle cells — called nuclei — scoot toward these tiny injuries to help patch them up, scientists recently discovered.

Striking images show how, shortly after the exercise concludes, nuclei scuttle toward tears in the muscle fibers and issue commands for new proteins to be built, in order to seal the wounds.

Skeletal muscles, which enable voluntary movements like walking, are made up of many thin, tubular cells; these cells are also called "muscle fibers," due to their thread-like appearance.

Previous studies have shown that, seconds after an exercise-induced injury occurs, various proteins form a "cap" over the  damaged region of the membrane, and nearby mitochondria, the so-called powerhouses of the cell, help sop up any excess calcium that entered the cell through the tear, since the amount of calcium in muscle cells must be kept in check for them to function properly. .

And now, the new study suggests that the nuclei in muscle cells rush over to help, too.

For the study, the researchers placed adult mice on a downward-tilted treadmill and then sampled muscle fibers from the animals following their jogging sessions.

They found that, in both the mouse muscle fibers and the human muscle fibers, proteins accumulated around tears in the fibers and formed "scars" within 5 hours after exercise.

And in muscle fibers sampled 24 hours after exercise, clusters of nuclei had drawn close to the tears, whereas nuclei appeared farther away in the 5-hour samples.

To see exactly how the nuclei had migrated toward the injury sites, the team grew mouse muscle cells in lab dishes and zapped them with lasers, to mimic exercise-induced injury.

In the lab-grown cells, the nuclei assembled around the laser injuries within 5 hours and soon generated "hotspots" of protein construction nearby.

The newly built proteins then help to seal and reconstruct the injured muscle cells.

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