C. elegans for human muscle health

We discovered that cell adhesion regulates specific muscle protein breakdown systems to maintain healthy muscle, and found that the complex cell adhesion system is required for keeping muscle healthy.

We have reported that mitochondrial function controls calcium levels in muscle cells which, in turn increases the breakdown of extracellular matrix and causes reduced muscle health.

We have established a C. elegans model for understanding the causes of, and countermeasures to, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.

We found that muscle from older people displays distinct molecular differences from younger adults after lengthening (eccentric) and shortening (concentric) contractions.

We demonstrated that the muscle growth response to eating a protein meal is short-lived, despite the continued presence of molecular signals for muscle to grow.

We reported that large individual variability exists in muscle growth responses to exercise when breathing low oxygen air (hypoxia), whereby people that experience the biggest drop in blood oxygen levels during hypoxic exposure have the lowest growth responses.

We have shown that a breakdown product of the essential amino acid leucine stimulates muscle growth responses and influences muscle breakdown responses via independent molecular signals.

We demonstrated that spaceflight causes highly reproducible molecular changes in C. elegans, which are also seen in higher organisms including people. These molecular changes broadly relate to maintaining muscle structure and mitochondrial function (the part of our cells that produce most of our energy).

We developed an automated, remotely operated system that can culture C. elegans for 12 generations on the International Space Station, and that these animals display normal developmental timings and capacity for reproduction.

We found that fundamental cellular processes that regulate gene expression are unaltered across multiple C. elegans generations cultured in spaceflight.

We established that key growth factor signalling pathways are decreased during spaceflight, and that these can be restored by using centrifugation to mimic Earth's gravity.