Speaker: Robert Wessells, assistant professor and recruitment officer in the School of Medicine (Physiology) at Wayne State University

Title: "Drosophila as a model for discovery of exercise mimetics"

Abstract: We have developed the first invertebrate system for chronic exercise training, using a fruit fly treadmill called the Power Tower.  After a three-week training paradigm on this device, flies respond with adaptations similar to those seen in mice and humans, including increased speed, endurance, cardiac performance, mitochondrial biogenesis and turnover, and increased autophagy.  Using this system we have identified a novel mediator of exercise, Sestrin, that is conserved with vertebrates.  Sestrin is required in muscle for flies and mice to adapt to chronic exercise and overexpression of sestrin in muscle causes flies to experience improvements similar to exercise training, even when they are completely sedentary.  We have also identified a neuronally produced biogenic amine, octopamine, which is necessary and sufficient to drive exercise improvements in sedentary flies.  As octopamine is analogous to vertebrate norepinephrine, these findings open the door to stimulation of exercise-like adaptations in sedentary humans through intermittent activation of adrenergic signaling.  Now that fly exercise has emerged as a useful tool to identify conserved mechanisms of exercise adaptation, we expect that flies will continue to point to novel factors that regulate exercise across the animal kingdom.

Host: Hua Bai, GDCB assistant professor

Please join us for refreshments before the seminar outside Room 1414 of the Molecular Biology Building.