Actuating Extracellular Matrices Decouple the Mechanical and Biochemical Effects of Muscle Contraction on Motor Neurons.

ABSTRACT: Emerging in vivo evidence suggests that repeated muscle contraction, or exercise, impacts peripheral nerves. However, the difficulty of isolating the muscle-specific impact on motor neurons in vivo, as well as the inability to decouple the biochemical and mechanical impacts of muscle contraction in this setting, motivates investigating this phenomenon in vitro. This study demonstrates that tuning the mechanical properties of fibrin enables longitudinal culture of highly contractile skeletal muscle monolayers, enabling functional characterization of and long-term secretome harvesting from exercised tissues. Motor neurons stimulated with exercised muscle-secreted factors significantly upregulate neurite outgrowth and migration, with an effect size dependent on muscle contraction intensity. A

SUBMITTER: Bu A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11874633 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature