Role of Human Antigen R (HuR) in Skeletal Muscle Adaptation and Resiliency
The risk of frailty increases when challenged with a stressor. Accordingly, frailty can be viewed as the inability to adapt to stress. Being weak or becoming weak are critical components of frailty. If muscles cannot properly adapt to physical stressors, age-related weakness will progressively develop into sarcopenia or frailty. Thus, an inability to respond and recover from repeated bouts of stress would be detrimental to healthy aging. Discovering mechanisms that promote skeletal muscle recovery and adaptation are therefore essential to combating sarcopenia and frailty. The Baumann Laboratory has recently identified a key regulator of muscle recovery that appears to respond differently in young and older animals. Dr. Baumann’s proposal aims to study this molecule in aging skeletal muscle, and determine if it contributes to age-related weakness.
