CMRI’s Computational Systems Biology team, led by Associate Professor Pengyi Yang, has a publication out in iScience detailing how the timing of muscle development is controlled will help scientists better understand disease.

Skeletal muscle develops from precursor cells called myoblasts through a process that is tightly regulated by complex signalling or communication networks within cells. This signalling is managed by control proteins called kinases. While some individual kinases have been studied previously, this paper is the first to describe the entire map of kinases functioning in this process over time.

The team found that particular kinases, called MAPKs, seemed to have a vital role in muscle development, which validated previous findings by others. They went further, dissecting the roles of MAPKs and identifying some of the key protein substrates that they control. Among these, they uncovered a ‘master’ control factor called NFIX that converts the signalling from MAPKs to instructions for gene transcription.

Together, these results provide the best global map of the signals controlling muscle development created to date.

Associate Professor Pengyi Yang says, “The molecular map we constructed, and the knowledge uncovered from this study will have implications for future research on muscle tissue regeneration and treatment of diseases associated with muscle degeneration.”

This work was performed in collaboration with the Metabolic Proteomics & Signal Transduction lab led by Dr Benjamin Parker at the Centre for Muscle Research, The University of Melbourne. The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) funded this work under the Investigator Grant (1173469) to Associate Professor Pengyi Yang.

Read the full iScience article here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.104489