Signal Strength

As your WiFi router blinks, it sends signals to your laptop, phone, and TV, connecting them to one another and the outside world. Here, we see another signalling hub, called the dystrophin glycoprotein complex (DGC, green), in the muscle fibres (red) of a fruit fly embryo. The DGC links each muscle cell's protein skeleton to the connective tissue outside, providing structural integrity. Now researchers have discovered that the DGC does so much more. By studying fruit flies, scientists showed that cells need a working DGC to respond properly to different stresses. Hundreds of different genes rely on the DGC to be switched on and off at the right moments. This helps explain what goes wrong in people with muscular dystrophies, caused by faulty DGCs, which could lead to new treatment strategies. Further probing the DGC could also hold the key to understanding muscle loss in ageing, cancer, AIDS, and other conditions.

Written by Henry Stennett

Henry Stennett

Writer

Henry is a science communicator at Cancer Research UK and a freelance writer. He used to research microbiology but now he’s got the writing bug.

• Image from work by Travis D. Carney and colleagues
• Hannover Medical School, Research Group Gene Expression and Signaling, Institute of Cell Biochemistry, Hannover, Germany
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Disease Models & Mechanisms, January 2023, with the image on the cover