Robert Seaborne

Scientists may well find themselves in a situation where they are desperately lacking a specific tool for conducting a study. Not because that tool has been mislaid, but because it has not been invented yet.

In that situation, there are two immediate options: they can abandon their study or they can develop the tool they need.

Robert Seaborne – biologist, postdoc and one of the five recipients of a Lundbeck Foundation 2022 Talent Prize – went for the last-named option together with colleagues at Exercise Laboratories (Xlab), Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Copenhagen.

And succeeded:

‘We have developed a study protocol – a method – that enables us to gather new information about how human skeletal muscles are regulated at a molecular level, and this is important for gaining a better understanding of a number of serious muscular diseases,’ says Seaborne.

The diseases he is referring to include myopathies, which cause muscle weakening, and a number of neurodegenerative diseases, including ALS, which is fatal.

The skeletal muscles make up a substantial part of the adult human body mass – 40-50% in men and 30-40% in women – and these muscles are mainly responsible for moving the body and keeping it upright.

Although our skeletal muscles are crucial for our functioning and well-being, they are difficult to investigate and analyse,’ Seaborne explains, and adds:

‘This is because the skeletal muscle cells have certain properties that are not present in other types of cells in the body. A sample of cells drawn from a patient’s skeletal muscles also automatically contains completely different cell types, and until now, we weren’t able to tell the different types of sample cells apart. Moreover, the skeletal muscle cells in themselves are made up of a number of different cell types, which we’ve also been unable to sort efficiently. These were the challenges that spurred us to develop the new method.’

Using this method, Seaborne and his colleagues at Xlab will now be seeking to gain a more nuanced understanding of skeletal muscle cell epigenetics:

‘In other words, the regulation, function and expression of DNA in these cells. The new method will allow us to analyse the structure and epigenetics right down to single-cell level. This will hopefully give us new knowledge about these cells – and thereby also a detailed picture of factors involved in muscular diseases,’ says Seaborne.

Robert Seaborne talks about his research and the Talent Prize 2022: 

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