Whether it be a brisk walk around the park or high-intensity training at the gym, exercise does a body good. But what if you could harness the benefits of a good workout without ever moving a muscle? Researchers at Michigan Medicine at the University of Michigan and collaborators, studying a class of naturally occurring proteins called Sestrins have found that these proteins can mimic many of exercise's effects in flies and mice. The findings could eventually help scientists combat muscle wasting due to aging and other causes. The results of the researchers’ work were published online on January 13, 2020 in Nature Communications. The open-access article is titled “Sestrins Are Evolutionarily Conserved Mediators of Exercise Benefits.” "Researchers have previously observed that Sestrin accumulates in muscle following exercise," said Myungjin Kim, PhD, a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular & Integrative Physiology at Michigan Medicine. Working with Professor Jun Hee Lee, PhD, Dr. Kim and a team of collaborating researchers wanted to learn more about the protein's apparent link to exercise. Their first step was to encourage a group of flies to work out. Taking advantage of Drosophila flies' normal instinct to climb up and out of a test tube, collaborators Robert Wessells, PhD, and Alyson Sujkowski, both of Wayne State University in Detroit, developed a type of fly treadmill. Using it, the team trained the flies for three weeks and compared the running and flying abilities of normal flies with those of flies bred to lack the ability to make Sestrin. "Flies can usually run around four to six hours at this point and the normal flies' abilities improved over that period," says Dr. Lee. "The flies without Sestrin did not improve with exercise."Login Or Register To Read Full Story