What's the deal with muscles? Sounds like the beginning of a Jerry
Seinfeld joke, doesn't it. Well, it's not. Some University of Michigan
researchers asked that question, in a roundabout way. They were looking
into the muscle building details of hormones. And they may have found
it. To save you some of the scientific jargon, these details could help
treat chronic muscle-deteriorating diseases as well as new ways in
dealing with tumor growth.
The team's findings, scheduled to be published
online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
could lead to new treatments for muscle-wasting diseases and new ways
of preventing the muscle loss that accompanies aging.
And because IGFs also are implicated in the growth and spread of
malignant tumors, the new insights may have implications in cancer
biology.
Like other peptide and protein hormones, IGFs work by binding to
receptors on the cells they target. The binding then sets off a cascade
of reactions that ultimately direct the cell to do something. You might
think that a given hormone, binding to a particular receptor, would
always elicit the same response from the cell, but that's not what
happens in the case of IGF and myoblasts (immature cells that develop
into muscle tissue).
Read the entire article here.