muscle – GOLLYGEE!

Scientists have been hard at work designing artificial muscle that gets activated when exposed to light:

Sakar and colleagues at MIT teamed up with scientists at the University of Pennsylvania to genetically engineer mouse muscle cells that twinge in response to light. The researchers loaded the cells with a light-activated protein, let the cells fuse into fibers, and mixed them with a special gel to form 3-D strips smaller than the width of a grain of rice. Then, they hit the strips with narrow beams of blue light.

Only the light-zapped fibers jumped; those in the dark stayed still. “I was hoping it would work, but the first time I saw it, it was amazing,” Sakar says. “I was very, very excited.”

Sakar and colleagues even got the muscle fibers to show off a bit of brawn. Tissue strips stretched between two tiny elastic posts pulled the structures together when scientists switched on the light.

Read more at Science News. The full report is on line Lab on a Chip. The MIT press release is here with a neat video.

In today’s New York Times there is an article about regenerating muscle tissue using thin sheets of extracellular matrix as a scaffold.

Dr. Peter Rubin, a plastic surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center who is a leader of the study, said that early results with Sergeant Strang and a handful of other patients showed that the animal scaffolding was spurring muscle growth. “We are seeing evidence of remodeling of tissues,” he said.

Last fall, Dr. Rubin cut out the scar tissue from Sergeant Strang’s leg and stitched a sheet resembling a thick piece of parchment paper — extracellular matrix from a pig urinary bladder, which had shown excellent results in lab studies — into the remaining healthy thigh muscle.

His body immediately started breaking down the matrix, which consists largely of collagen and other proteins. But the doctors expected, and wanted, that to happen — by degrading into smaller compounds, the matrix started the signaling process, recruiting stem cells to come to the site where they could become muscle cells.

“We’re trying to work with nature rather than fight nature,” said another leader of the study, Dr.Stephen Badylak, deputy director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the university.

Dr. Badylak is a pioneer in the use of extracellular matrix, having discovered many of its properties more than two decades ago while performing biomedical engineering research at Purdue University. As part of his work on a mechanical heart device, he was looking for a way to move blood from one part of the body to another but wanted to avoid synthetic materials, which can cause blood clots.

Click here to read more.

GOLLYGEE!

Tag: muscle

light activated muscle

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