The Myogenesis Discussion Group host a seminar series on skeletal, cardiac and smooth muscle research held virtually on the last Monday of each month. 

This month’s presenters: 

Thibaux Van der Stede and Roger Moreno Justicia: Skeletal Muscle Fiber Heterogeneity Beyond Myosin Heavy Chains and its Relation to Myopathy and Exercise Responses

Thibaux is working at Ghent and Copenhagen University on the physiology of skeletal muscle, from the molecular signals driving exercise adaptations to the relevance of the large diversity of muscle and non-muscle cells. Roger is a PhD student at CBMR working on the application of sensitive MS-based proteomics workflows to study skeletal muscle and its adaptations to training. In this joint project, they developed novel transcriptomic and proteomic workflows to profile individual human skeletal muscle fibers. By doing this, they show that myosin heavy chains are not the principal drivers of skeletal muscle fiber heterogeneity. Instead, ribosomal specialization drives the majority of variance between skeletal muscle fibers in a continual fashion, independent of a slow/fast fiber type. Furthermore, their data challenge the concept that type 2X are phenotypically distinct from other fast fibers at an omics level. They also apply these workflows to study a genetic muscle disease, nemaline myopathy, and the heterogeneity of acute exercise responses.

To register for this event: 

Contact event organizers Dr Matthew Rok, Dr Bella Xu, or Dr Vanessa Raileanu. 

About the Myogenesis Discussion Group: 

The goal of this discussion group is to explore models of development, disease, and regeneration in muscle tissues, as well as potential therapeutic approaches. Within this, they aim to discuss novel techniques to quantitatively measure all aspects of myology and the challenges associated with developing representative models for these complex tissues. 

Learn more at https://mbd.utoronto.ca/research/discussion-groups/, or Follow the Myogenesis Discussion Group on Twitter @MyogenesisGroup