Cellular crosstalk in skeletal muscle? A surprising role for mast cells? Histamine as a signal transducer during exercise? This was an amazing ride during my time @TeamDerave, now published in @Cell_Metabolism (1/11). @ugent_fge, @FWOVlaanderen .

RT @RobWust: The 52nd European Muscle Conference (EMC 2025) takes place from September 20–24 2025 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This annual ev….

RT @Cell_Metabolism: Cellular deconstruction of the human skeletal muscle microenvironment identifies an exercise-induced histaminergic cro….

Proud to have our paper featured on the cover of the April issue of @Cell_Metabolism. It shows an exercise-induced degranulating mast cell releasing histamine. Thanks a lot for the design Emma @DrawImpacts. Read the full story here: @TeamDerave

RT @SportsGenomics: Human skeletal muscle fiber heterogeneity beyond myosin heavy chains.

RT @atul_deshmukh1: Excited to share our manuscript, where we analyzed >1,000 single muscle fibers by transcriptomics and proteomics reveal….

RT @Roger_MorenoJ: Check out our latest publication in @NatureComms, where @atul_deshmukh1 and our team at @Metabolcenter joined forces wit….

Check out my previous post from when we posted our paper as a preprint for the key take-home messages 🔥. Thank you to everyone involved in this work, it was a pleasure. @ugent_fge @FWOVlaanderen (2/2).

A deep dive into the heterogeneity of human muscle fibers using transcriptomics and proteomics, now online @NatureComms. This was an amazing collaboration between @TeamDerave and @Roger_MorenoJ, Ben Stocks and @atul_deshmukh1 at @Metabolcenter (1/2).

RT @Cell_Metabolism: New! Online now: Cellular deconstruction of the human skeletal muscle microenvironment identifies an exercise-induced….

RT @Lo_Zanzi: #WeekendRead. #EveryOrganIsAnImmuneOrgan. @TeamDerave shows @Cell_Metabolism that mast cells release histamine during skeleta….

RT @proferikrichter: Breakthrough science!.

RT @Matt_Muscle_Guy: New @Cell_Metabolism paper: Cellular deconstruction of the human skeletal muscle microenvironment identifies an exerci….

A BIG thank you to everyone involved in this project throughout the years: @TeamDerave, Katrien De Bock, @proferikrichter, @CVgroupNEXS, @jvdesomp, @AlexiaLoock, @eline_lievens, @MaxUllrich94, @janspaas, @PeterVanEenoo, @RuudVanThienen (11/11).

All this and more in the full version of our paper: (10/11)

Instead, we believe this is mainly caused by a blunted inflammatory response from blocking H1 receptors in the muscle microenvironment and a lowered glucose supply. (9/11)

We then blocked this pathway via administration of H1 and H2 receptor antagonists to humans during and following exercise. Main observation: blocking H1 receptors resulted in an impaired glycogen resynthesis after exercise, independent of canonical insulin signaling. (8/11)

Is this pathway activated by exercise? Yes! We observed a very clear increase in histamine concentration in the muscle interstitial fluid during exercise. And this is a very local phenomenon in the muscle microenvironment, as we did not see a spillover in the circulation (7/11)

Histamine likely signals by being produced in mast cells (via the HDC enzyme) and binding to the specific histamine H1 and H2 receptors that are mainly expressed on myeloid and some vascular cells. (6/11)

By performing some bioinformatic modeling of cellular crosstalk, focused on these mast cells, we obtained new insights into potential signaling networks driven by mast cells. One pathway sparked our interest: histamine signaling from mast cells to myeloid cells (5/11)

This suggested to us that the mononuclear non-muscle cells in skeletal muscle might play a crucial role. We composed a complete cellular profile of skeletal muscle by integrating a single-cell and single-fiber RNA-seq dataset. Look at the small mast cell population! (4/11)