Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Force production by a muscle is critical to maintaining proper function and overall health of a human or animal. Muscle adapts to increased loading with hypertrophy by activating a number of intracellular signaling cascades that regulate protein synthesis. The overall hypothesis is that force-dependent processes acutely activate growth-related signaling during active force generation. This project took two approaches. The first employed a general survey of muscles in which age-dependent changes in muscle activity differed. No conclusive activity-dependent signaling emerged however coordinated signaling among kinases broke down with age. The second approach utilized an in situ muscle preparation in which force production or metabolic costs were specifically controlled. Similar sub-maximal force levels generated by different methods found that force, per se, is not a primary modulator of growth-related signaling but that ERK phosphorylation is dependent on fiber-activation. Prolonging the duration of electrical stimulation applied to the nerve or increasing the frequency at which stimulations are applied was expected to increase the metabolic stress associated with contraction. Several growth-related kinases correlated with markers of metabolic stress, i.e. increased AMPK activity and decreased glycogen content, which were decoupled from force decline. This suggests energy depletion, specific to stimulation pattern, strongly influences the immediate response to high force contraction signaling. The overall conclusion is that signaling molecules previously implicated in force-dependent signaling lie much too downstream to relay strict force-dependent signaling.

Patients with phosphatase and tensin homolog (PTEN) hamartoma tumor syndrome and germline mutations in PTEN frequently develop lipomatosis, for which there is no standard treatment. Rapamycin was shown to reduce the growth of lipoma cells with heterozygous PTEN deficiency in vitro, but concomitantly induced an upregulation of AKT phosphorylation. Since it was shown that resveratrol stabilizes PTEN, we asked whether co-incubation with resveratrol could suppress the rapamycin-induced AKT phosphorylation in PTEN-deficient lipoma cells. Resveratrol incubation resulted in decreased lipoma cell viability by inducing G1-phase cell cycle arrest and apoptosis. PTEN expression and AKT phosphorylation were not significantly changed, whereas p70S6 kinase (p70S6K) phosphorylation was reduced in PTEN-deficient lipoma cells after resveratrol incubation. Rapamycin/resveratrol co-incubation significantly decreased viability further at lower doses of resveratrol and resulted in decreased p70S6K phosphorylation compared to rapamycin incubation alone, suggesting that resveratrol potentiated the growth inhibitory effects of rapamycin by reducing p70S6K activation. Both viability and p70S6K phosphorylation of primary PTEN wild-type preadipocytes were less affected compared to PTEN-deficient lipoma cells by equimolar concentrations of resveratrol. These results support the concept of combining chemopreventive natural compounds with mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) inhibitors to increase the efficacy of chemotherapeutic drugs for patients suffering from overgrowth syndromes.