Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The major goal of the research performed in my laboratory is to discover novel strategies for controlling blood vessel formation in skeletal muscle. Growth of new blood vessels is a normal healthy response that enables our muscles to adapt appropriately to varying energy demands, including the storage and use of dietary fats. In the short term, an excess of dietary fat promotes beneficial adaptations in the skeletal muscle, to help store and use the excess fat. Such adaptations often include the growth of new blood vessels, to help with the delivery of the energy to the muscle cells. However the signals that coordinate this response in healthy individuals are not known. My research group will focus on defining the relationship between short term fat excess and the regulation of blood vessel growth in skeletal muscle. Second, we will evaluate the potential role of a cell that resides between blood vessels and skeletal muscle cells, the pericyte, as an important coordinator of the adaptive responses to excess dietary fat. We will investigate the function of the protein leptin as an important communicating signal that is produced and released from pericytes to coordinate adaptations in muscle cells and blood vessels. A strength and uniqueness of this project is the combination of approaches that we will employ (both mouse and human muscle, and cell culture models), which will allow us to uncover unique evidence of the regulation of blood vessel growth by fat excess, and the importance of pericytes in coordinating this response. Overall, this research will identify novel targets that may be tested in the future for their capacity to enhance blood vessel growth in skeletal muscle.