Bigger, Better Muscles

Developing stronger muscles does not require exercise, protein shakes, or even Popeye-sized helpings of spinach. It requires gelatin – well, that’s assuming the muscles in question are those being grown in a culture dish. Such laboratory-grown muscle is an essential tool for studying muscle development, disease and for testing potential muscle treatments. But scientists have had a problem: cultured muscle fibres are puny. That’s because after a week or so of growth on regular synthetic substrates, the cells begin to detach, weakening the muscle fibre. Growing muscle cells (pictured) on a newly engineered hydrogel substrate composed of gelatin, however, improves cellular adhesion and in turn muscle integrity. Gelatin is a derivative of collagen, a protein of the extracellular matrix, which holds cells together in the body. The more robust anchoring of the cells enables them to grow longer and thicker and thus to more accurately reflect muscles of the body.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image by Archana Bettadapur, Gio Suh, Evelyn Wang, Holly Huber, Alyssa Viscio and Megan McCain
• Laboratory for Living Systems Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
• Image copyright held by original authors
• Research published in Scientific Reports, June 2016