Lots of good news this month! We have another paper accepted, this time in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise – the leading journal for the American College of Sports Medicine. Congratulations to Benjamin Kugler for his third first-author publication, and all other authors for their contributions!

The paper is entitled “Distinct Adaptations of Mitochondrial Dynamics to Electrical Pulse Stimulation in Lean and Severely Obese Primary Myotubes”. We compared the effects of electrical pulse stimulation (EPS), an in vitro method mimicking skeletal muscle contraction during exercise, on mitochondrial dynamics (fusion and fission), network structure and insulin action in cultured myotubes established from lean versus humans with severe obesity. We found that EPS improved mitochondrial network structure and insulin signaling in both groups. Interestingly, EPS elicited distinct improvement in the molecular machinery of mitochondrial dynamics by increasing mitochondrial fusion protein Mitofusin 2 in lean humans but reducing fission protein Dynamin-Related Protein 1 in humans with severe obesity. To read the full article, it is available on the journal website.