Skeletal muscle is not only the tissue responsible for your daily body movements. Skeletal muscle is a tissue composed of cells specialized in synthetizing giant proteins as no other cell type in the human body can do. Skeletal muscle depends on their great number of nuclei (myonuclei) to produce ribosomes, the cellular machinery responsible for protein synthesis. How ribosomes are regulated and the effect of different stimuli on muscle ribosome biogenesis are the questions addressed in the VCF lab.
Ribosome biogenesis is the de novo synthesis of ribosomes. It is a highly regulated cellular process with several steps, requiring the orchestration of multiple enzymatic complexes. One of the most important steps of ribosome biogenesis is the ribosomal DNA (rDNA) transcription. Our goal is to understand how muscle ribosome biogenesis occurs, in health and disease.
You can learn more about muscle ribosome biogenesis from these key publications:
Figueiredo VC, & McCarthy JJ. Regulation of Ribosome Biogenesis in Skeletal Muscle Hypertrophy. Physiology (Bethesda). 2019 Jan 1;34(1):30-42. doi: 10.1152/physiol.00034.2018.
Figueiredo VC. Revisiting the roles of protein synthesis during skeletal muscle hypertrophy induced by exercise. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol. 2019 Nov 1;317(5):R709-R718. doi: 10.1152/ajpregu.00162.2019.