London, Dec 2 (IANS) Cells must rid themselves of the garbage accumulated over time, or muscles will deteriorate with age, researchers have found.
The waste includes spent organelles, toxic clumps of proteins, and pathogens.

The researchers made their discovery by studying mice that were deficient in a gene required for the tightly controlled process of degradation and recycling within cells known as autophagy.

Those animals showed profound muscle atrophy and muscle weakening that worsened with age.

“If there is a failure of the system to remove what is damaged, and that persists, the muscle fibre isn’t happy,” said Marco Sandri of the University of Padova in Italy.

The findings may have clinical implications, he says. There has been interest in developing therapies to block protein degradation for treating certain muscle-wasting disorders.

The muscle wasting observed in the mice seems to bear some resemblance to certain forms of muscle-wasting diseases, Sandri said.

He now suspects that this kind of mechanism may offer insight into some of those still-unexplained conditions, as well as the muscle weakening that comes with normal aging (a condition known as sarcopenia).

These findings are slated for publication in the current issue of Cell Metabolism.