Writing a review during lockdown

Neuromuscular junctions ensure the transmission of a signal from motor neurons to muscle fibers, causing muscle contraction. They are the site for many severe diseases and have been the subject of a huge research effort. While neuron distress has been for long seen as the pathologic event affecting muscle, the idea emerged in the last decade that a dysfunction of the muscle may be responsible for the degeneration of the neuron.

A key question to decipher

The importance of this change in paradigm pushed Prof. Perrine Castets to investigate further muscle and nerve interactions. Her paper in Nature Communications written during her Ambizione position at the Biozentrum in Basel was the starting point of her research on the influence of muscle fibers on the maintenance of neuromuscular junctions. It convinced her of the importance of TOR (Target of Rapamycin), a pathway essential for muscle metabolism, in the regulation of the neuron / muscle interplays.

The benefits of the lockdown

When the lockdown arrived last spring, Prof. Perrine Castets was trying to deblock time to write a review about the TOR pathway and neuromuscular junctions. This unexpected situation allowed her to give birth to this review and to answer an important question: could the TOR pathway be more than a metabolic player at the neuromuscular junction?

Interested to discover the answer?

Download her review published in Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience and discover how the TOR pathway can influence the maintenance, and alternatively the destabilization, of the neuron / muscle connection, in healthy and pathological conditions.

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