How Exercise Might Mitigate Age-Related Decline in Skeletal Muscle Structure and Function - Neuroscience News

Strikingly, they found that myonuclei – commonly referred to as the ‘control centre’ of muscle fibres – were more spherical, less deformable, and contained more of a protein called lamin A than untrained individuals.

Whilst it is appreciated that exercise can mitigate the decline in muscle function, the precise mechanisms that control this process are not fully understood.

The researchers speculated that nuclei in muscle cells, called myonuclei, would show similar abnormalities to laminopathies in aging individuals.

Image is in the public domainAs gatekeepers of the genome, nuclei govern cell fate and function, and the nuclear alterations we observed may promote muscle adaptation to exercise.

The authors hope that unraveling the beneficial effects of exercise may guide treatments to improve the healthspan of our ever-expanding aging population.

Here, we isolated single muscle fibres and carried out detailed morphological and functional analyses on myonuclei from young and older exercise-trained individuals.