Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Sarcopenia, the loss of skeletal muscle mass during aging, increases the risk for falls and dependency. Resistance exercise (RE) training is an effective treatment to improve muscle mass and strength in older adults, but aging is associated with a smaller amount of training-induced hypertrophy. This may be due in part to an inability to stimulate muscle-protein synthesis (MPS) after an acute bout of RE. We hypothesized that older adults would have impaired mammalian target of rapamycin complex (mTORC)1 signaling and MPS response compared with young adults after acute RE.

We measured intracellular signaling and MPS in 16 older (mean 70 ± 2 years) and 16 younger (27 ± 2 years) subjects. Muscle biopsies were sampled at baseline and at 3, 6 and 24 hr after exercise. Phosphorylation of regulatory signaling proteins and MPS were determined on successive muscle biopsies by immunoblotting and stable isotopic tracer techniques, respectively.

Increased phosphorylation was seen only in the younger group (P< 0.05) for several key signaling proteins after exercise, including mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR), ribosomal S6 kinase (S6K)1, eukaryotic initiation factor 4E-binding protein (4E-BP)1 and extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK)1/2, with no changes seen in the older group (P > 0.05). After exercise, MPS increased from baseline only in the younger group (P< 0.05), with MPS being significantly greater than that in the older group (P < 0.05).

We conclude that aging impairs contraction-induced human skeletal muscle mTORC1 signaling and protein synthesis. These age-related differences may contribute to the blunted hypertrophic response seen after resistance-exercise training in older adults, and highlight the mTORC1 pathway as a key therapeutic target to prevent sarcopenia.

As the resident stem cells of skeletal muscle, satellite cells are activated by extracellular cues associated with local damage. Once activated, satellite cells will re-enter the cell cycle to proliferate and supply a population of myoblasts, which will repair or replace damaged myofibers by differentiating and fusing either with an existing myofiber or with each other. There is also evidence that the orientation of cell division with respect to the myofiber may indicate or convey asymmetry in the two daughter cells. Our recent studies with time-lapse imaging of myofiber-associated satellite cells in vitro have yielded new data on the timing and orientation of satellite cell divisions, and revealed persistent differences in the behavior of daughter cells from planar versus vertical divisions.

We analyzed 244 individual fiber-associated satellite cells in time-lapse video from 24 to 48 hours after myofiber harvest. We found that initial cell division in fiber culture is not synchronous, although presumably all cells were activated by the initial trauma of harvest; that cell cycling time is significantly shorter than previously thought (as short as 4.8 hours, averaging 10 hours between the first and second divisions and eight hours between the second and third); and that timing of subsequent divisions is not strongly correlated with timing of the initial division. Approximately 65% of first and 80% of second cell divisions occur parallel to the axis of the myofiber, whereas the remainder occur outside the plane of the fiber surface (vertical division). We previously demonstrated that daughter cells frequently remain associated with each other after division or reassociate after a brief separation, and that unrelated cells may also associate for significant periods of time. We show in this paper that daughter cells resulting from a vertical division remain associated with one another several times longer than do daughters from a horizontal division. However, the total average time of association between sister cells is not significantly different from the total average time of association between unrelated cells.

These longitudinal characterizations of satellite cell behavior shortly after activation provide new insights into cell proliferation and association as a function of relatedness, and indicate significant and consistent heterogeneity within the population based on these metrics.