Decoding Muscle Adaptation through Skeletal Muscle Negative Data: Understanding the Signaling Factors Involved

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Background

Skeletal muscle adaptation can be defined as improvements in performance and the underlying tissue size/composition in response to exercise training. The adaptation of skeletal muscle to exercise occurs through various signaling pathways, some of which are well established and accepted in scientific literature, making it challenging to publish negative or non-significant data. This leads to repetition of experiments and loss of time and resources. However, given exercise training induced physiological changes often times employ large, concerted efforts of multiple signaling cascades in several different organ systems simultaneously, negative results can be valuable as they can highlight which pathways may not be involved and suggest alternative paths for further investigation. This information can identify potential biomarkers and signaling mechanisms that that can be targeted in future studies to enhance adaptive responses, such as increased performance, muscle growth, aerobic/anaerobic capacity, and improved muscle quality.

The aim of this Research Topic is to provide a platform for researchers to publish negative results that have been obtained through well-designed research on exercise training adaptations and related signaling mechanisms. By doing so, this can lead to better information sharing and greater progress in the field of exercise science as it allows other researchers to refine their research and increase their chances of making new discoveries. The ideal submissions for this Research Topic should include details on the methods used, including a careful description of the controls for the experiments, a critical evaluation of the results and interpretation of the data including a rationale/hypothesis for the importance of the negative results to the field, and suggestions for future directions to address the issue.

This Research Topic will welcome original research, including experimental papers involving animal models, that cover the following aspects in their research:

1) Must present negative results.

2) Research must be focused on some type of exercise training intervention or mimetic and include at least one measure of phenotype

3) Research should either show that performance or function changed, or demonstrate that it is tied into the interpretation of negative data related to phenotype and/or signaling

4) Research must contain measures of underlying muscle signaling factors (e.g., individual molecules, local systemic factors, signaling pathways, epigenetic modifications, etc.) related to skeletal muscle exercise training induced adaptation. Examples of experimental methods used to obtain this data include, but are not limited to: PCR, Western Blot, ELISA, stereology and other image-based quantification methods, and bisulfite sequencing.

Keywords: Negative data, exercise adaptation, performance, muscle fiber area, ribosome biogenesis, satellite cells, epigenetics

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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