Congratulations to Blake Rasmussen, PhD and lab on their publication in Geroscience!
A new study from the lab of Blake Rasmussen, PhD has identified new functional regulators of the differences in exercise response between young and old men. These might be future targets to improve exercise output in older populations. Dr. Rasmussen is Professor and Chair of the Department of Cellular & Integrative Physiology, Director of the Center for Metabolic Health, and an investigator with the Sam And Ann Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies.
Resistance exercise training in older men reduces ATF4-activated and senescence-associated mRNAs in skeletal muscle
Zachary D Von Ruff, Matthew J Miller, Tatiana Moro, Paul T Reidy, Scott M Ebert, Elena Volpi, Christopher M Adams, Blake B Rasmussen
Geroscience. 2025 Feb 27. doi: 10.1007/s11357-025-01564-2. Online ahead of print.
Abstract:
Sarcopenia increases the risk of frailty, morbidity, and mortality in older adults. Resistance exercise training improves muscle size and function; however, the response to exercise training is variable in older adults. The objective of our study was to determine both the age-independent and age-dependent changes to the transcriptome following progressive resistance exercise training. Skeletal muscle biopsies were obtained before and after 12 weeks of resistance exercise training in 8 young (24 ± 3.3 years) and 10 older (72 ± 4.9 years) men. RNA was extracted from each biopsy and prepared for analysis via RNA sequencing. We performed differential mRNA expression, gene ontology, and gene set enrichment analyses. We report that when comparing post-training vs pre-training 226 mRNAs and 959 mRNAs were differentially expressed in the skeletal muscle of young and older men, respectively. Additionally, 94 mRNAs increased, and 17 mRNAs decreased in both young and old, indicating limited overlap in response to resistance exercise training. Furthermore, the differential gene expression was larger in older skeletal muscle. Finally, we report three novel findings: 1) resistance exercise training decreased the abundance of ATF4-activated and senescence-associated skeletal muscle mRNAs in older men; 2) resistance exercise-induced increases in lean mass correlate with increased mRNAs encoding mitochondrial proteins; and 3) increases in muscle strength following resistance exercise positively correlate with increased mRNAs involved in translation, rRNA processing, and polyamine metabolism. We conclude that resistance exercise training elicits a differential gene expression response in young and old skeletal muscle, including reduced ATF-4 activated and senescence-associated gene expression.
Keywords: ATF4; Aging; Resistance exercise; Senescence; Skeletal muscle.