Question: What has been the best thing about working with muscle and finding out how they grown?

Elliot Jokl answered on 16 Jun 2016:

Thanks for the question!

I decided to do a PhD because I really enjoy doing hands-on, practical science and I am really enjoying the chance to do practical experiments and figuring out new facts that no-one knew before.

The thing that is particularly interesting about muscle is that it is one of the most adaptable tissues in your body. It grows when you use it, and shrinks if you don’t. That ability to adapt muscle size is very important to keep the body strong and to stop your muscles from getting damaged.

My PhD was inspired by a mutant mouse that doesn’t seem to be able to get its muscles to grow when the mouse uses them, which leads to the muscles getting damaged and quite weak. The interesting thing that we are starting to understand in my project is that it is very important for muscle to be able to repair damage by getting rid of old and broken molecules, and to make new molecules to replace them. The mutant mouse is missing a specific protein, called KY, which seems to be important for this recycling process to work well. One way I am testing this is to make mutant muscle cells and mutant zebrafish to see if they develop the same problems, which will support the idea that KY is an important molecule. This might mean that people could try and develop new treatments for muscle diseases based on what KY does, if we can figure it out!