Muscle gene linked to type 2 diabetes

[Northerner]

People with type 2 diabetes tend to have poorer muscle function than others. Now a research team at Lund University in Sweden has discovered that in type 2 diabetes, a specific gene is of great importance for the ability of muscle stem cells to create new mature muscle cells. The findings are published in Nature Communications.

"In people with type 2 diabetes, the VPS39 gene is significantly less active in the muscle cells than it is in other people, and the stem cells with less activity of the gene do not form new muscle cells to the same degree. The gene is important when muscle cells absorb sugar from blood and build new muscle. Our study is the first ever to link this gene to type 2 diabetes," says Charlotte Ling, professor of epigenetics at Lund University who led the study.

Muscle gene linked to type 2 diabetes

People with type 2 diabetes tend to have poorer muscle function than others. Now a research team has discovered that in type 2 diabetes, a specific gene is of great importance for the ability of muscle stem cells to create new mature muscle cells.

www.sciencedaily.com

 

[mikeyB]

As that adds a grain of knowledge which doesn’t point to any new treatment, it’s merely interesting. Who pays for this kind of useless research? All they have to do now is decide whether this is consequence of T2 or is a marker for the disease. Maybe in some science fiction future when you just design your babies to be as disease free as possible, so they are free to be run over by a bus.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

Who pays for this kind of useless research?

This work was supported by grants from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research IRC15-0067, Swedish Research Council, Region Skåne (ALF), Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, EFSD/Lilly Fellowship, Söderberg Foundation, The Swedish Diabetes Foundation, Diabetes Wellness Sweden, Påhlsson Foundation, The Royal Physiographic Society of Lund, EXODIAB (2009-1039), and Linné grant (B31 5631/2006). The Centre of Inflammation and Metabolism (CIM) is supported by a grant from the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF55). The Centre for Physical Activity Research (CFAS) is supported by a grant from Trygfonden. Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research is an independent Research Center, based at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), and partially funded by an unconditional donation from the Novo Nordisk Foundation (http://www.cbmr.ku.dk/) (Grant number NNF18CC0034900).

 

[Lanny]

As that adds a grain of knowledge which doesn’t point to any new treatment, it’s merely interesting. Who pays for this kind of useless research? All they have to do now is decide whether this is consequence of T2 or is a marker for the disease. Maybe in some science fiction future when you just design your babies to be as disease free as possible, so they are free to be run over by a bus.

Have you ever seen the film “Gattaca”? A future world where people mostly pick their children from the fertilised eggs with the best genes before they’re born & the few “God Child’s”, conceived in the old fashioned way with no manipulation, don’t stand a chance & are left to do low paying jobs etc. But, one such “God Child”, his parent’s first son who then chose their second son from the best fertilised eggs, decided to go into the space programme going to Titan, a moon of Saturn, by impersonating someone with superior genes who had a car accident & is in a wheelchair! A great, uplifting film of an underdog who did indeed succeed & made it onto the trip to Titan while his superior twin, shall we say, left back on earth kills himself after preparing loads of blood & urine samples frozen for his twin to use when he gets back to Earth: it turns out that he couldn’t live with the quest for perfection & the car accident was a deliberate attempt at suicide after getting a disappointing Silver medal when he was trying for Gold!