Abstract:

BACKGROUND: Resistance exercise has been widely used in rehabilitation training, but its signal transduction pathway in regulating growth and development and atrophy muscle regeneration remains poorly understood. Mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) has been proved has certain effect.
OBJECTIVE: To retrospective analyze the role of mTOR, mTOR protein pathway and mTOR signal transduction in regulating muscle volume during resistance exercise.
METHODS: PubMed database (1985-2008) was searched by the first author for literatures regarding origin of mTOR protein, upstream and downstream proteins in signal pathway.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Akt/mTOR signal pathway can adjust the growth of muscles by increasing protein synthesis, but it should be pointed out that, regrowth of atrophied muscles may depend on other pathways although mTOR pathway plays an important role in the growth of muscles. In further researches the following should be discussed such as the function of mTOR to induce the phenotypic growth of the regular and atrophied muscles, the relationship between regulation of mTOR under the load and signals such as cell growth and nutrition, growth factor and cellular energy, and signal transduction pathway of external signals turned into ones about the change of muscle mass.