There’s no doubt that exercise has positive effects on the body, strengthening muscles, strengthening bones, blood vessels, and the immune system, but MIT engineers found that exercise also has benefits at the level of individual neurons. I discovered.
They observed that when muscles contract during exercise, they release a soup of biochemical signals called myokines. In the presence of these muscle-generated signals, neurons grew four times farther compared to neurons not exposed to myokines.
These cellular-level experiments suggest that exercise can have profound biochemical effects on neuronal growth. Surprisingly, the researchers also discovered that neurons respond not only to the biochemical signals of movement, but also to its physical effects.
Previous studies have shown a potential biochemical link between muscle activity and nerve growth, but the results show that physical effects can be just as important. This is the first time that this study has been conducted, and the results may shed light on the relationship between muscles and nerves during exercise and provide information about exercise. Related therapies to repair nerves.
“Now that we know that this muscle-to-nerve crosstalk exists, it could be useful in treating conditions such as nerve injuries, where communication between nerves and muscles is interrupted.” Ritu Raman saysis an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and senior author of the study. “Perhaps stimulating the muscles could encourage nerve healing and restore mobility in people who have lost nerves due to trauma or neurodegenerative diseases.”
“Exercise as medicine”
In 2023, Raman et al. reported that they were able to restore mobility in mice that had experienced traumatic muscle injury by first transplanting muscle tissue into the injured area and then repeatedly stimulating it with light to cause the new tissue to move. . Over time, the researchers found that the exercised implants restored motor function in the mice, allowing them to reach activity levels comparable to healthy mice.
When the researchers analyzed the graft itself, they found that regular exercise stimulated the grafted muscle to produce specific biochemical signals known to promote nerve and blood vessel growth. It turned out.
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“We always think that nerves control muscles, but we don’t think that muscles fight back against nerves,” Raman says. “So we started wondering if stimulating the muscles was promoting nerve growth. People said maybe that was the case, but animals also have other There are hundreds of different types of cells, and it’s very difficult to prove that the muscles are causing more nerve growth, rather than the immune system or something else being involved.”
among them New research published in Focusing solely on muscle and nerve tissue, the research team set out to determine whether muscle exercise directly affects nerve growth.
The researchers genetically modified the muscles to contract in response to light. This modification allowed the research team to repeatedly flash the lights and contract the muscles in response, in a way that mimics the act of locomotion. Raman previously developed a new gel mat for growing and exercising muscle tissue. The gel’s properties are that it can support muscle tissue and prevent it from peeling off when researchers stimulate the muscles for exercise.
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The team then collected samples of the solution around the muscle tissue moving, which they thought must contain myokines, which contain a mixture of growth factors, RNA, and other proteins.
“Muscles secrete myokines almost all the time, but when you exercise, they secrete even more myokines,” Raman says.
Researchers grew neurons from stem cells derived from mice. Similar to muscle tissue, neurons were also grown on similar gel mats. After the neurons were exposed to the myokine mixture, the research team observed that the neurons began to grow rapidly. This is four times faster than neurons that did not receive the biochemical solution.
“They grow much farther and faster, and the impact is very immediate,” Raman said.
To learn more about how neurons change in response to exercise-induced myokines, the research team performed genetic analysis and extracted RNA from neurons to determine whether myokines affect the expression of specific neuronal genes. We checked to see if it induced any changes.
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“Many of the genes upregulated in exercise-stimulated neurons are related not only to neuron growth, but also to their maturation, the extent to which they interact with muscles and other nerves, and the degree of axonal maturation. That’s what I found out,” Raman said. . “Exercise appears to affect not only neuron growth, but also neuronal maturation and function.”
This result suggests that the biochemical effects of exercise may promote neuronal growth. So the group wondered if the purely physical effects of exercise might have similar benefits.
“Neurons are physically attached to muscles, so they can stretch and move with the muscles,” Raman says. “Also, in the absence of biochemical cues from muscles, can mechanical forces (from exercise) be mimicked to stretch neurons back and forth, and can that also influence growth? I also wanted to know.”
Both the biochemical and physical effects of exercise were found to be “equally important.”
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The group has shown that muscle exercise can promote nerve growth at the cellular level, leading to new research on how targeted muscle stimulation can be used to grow and heal damaged nerves and treat neurodegenerative diseases. The plan is to study whether it is possible to restore the athletic ability of people who have suffered from this disease. ALS.
“This is just the first step toward understanding and controlling exercise as a medical science,” Raman said.
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