How meeting SDU colleagues at random social events can initiate fun scientific collaborations

By Coen Elemans, Associate Professor, Biology.

Recently we published a paper in eLIFE that includes collaborators from all over SDU. I think it is a fantastic piece of integrative muscle physiology I am very proud of.

It was also an interesting journey to get this paper together that started back in 2008.

In that year I moved to SDU from Salt Lake City and also published a paper with my US colleagues describing the discovery of so-called superfast muscles in songbirds.

Superfast muscles

These muscles can move over 100 and up to 250 times per second and were thought to be only present in a rather obscure fish – the toadfish - and the tail of rattlesnakes.

They are a great model to study normal muscle contraction because all molecular and cellular systems are tweaked to the extreme, more clearly exposing underlying mechanisms.

In an earlier paper from my PhD thesis in Nature we showed that superfast muscles may be present in the vocal organ of doves, but this 2008 paper really nailed their presence and also in songbirds with 10.000 species a significant chunk of the vertebrates.

Teaming up with Faculty of Health

Arriving at SDU, I was eager to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying this extreme performance and soon I came into contact with a muscle physiologist from the Faculty of Health: Niels Ørtenblad. Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics

We wanted to see if we could measure calcium activation of single muscle fibers – his specialty - in the superfast muscles. This proved to be very difficult but instead we decided to look into cellular morphology using TEM with his then PhD student Joachim Nielsen.

Then in the summer of 2009, I worked at the Marine Biological laboratories in Woods Hole, MA on toadfish muscle and met up with my friend, Andy Mead with whom I did the earlier bird work.

Published in Science

In the spur of the moment, I convinced him to visit me in Denmark. I had a hunch that also the laryngeal muscles of bats were also superfast – a mammal first.

We got a small travel grant, did the experiments during a lovely spring of 2010, confirmed the hunch and managed to publish this work in Science in 2011.

Now we had two new groups of vertebrates with superfast muscles and suddenly they were all over!

Teaming up with Irina Kratchmarova, BMB

Also at this time the zebra finch and bats genomes had become available and to really understand the superfast muscles I felt we needed to know which motor proteins were responsible for this fast behavior.

However as a person trained in biomechanics, molecular biology was not one of my skills to say the least. But completely random I met Irina Kratchmarova (BMB) during a meeting of the lector training program.

We hit it off right away, but found ourselves needing money to do the work and only two days to the Carlsberg Equipment Grant deadline!

Big furry white rabbits and a tornado

In a frenzy of night writing, budgets and letters, I managed to get a grant in on time. We were so lucky to get it and so the molecular biology on superfast muscle could start.

Disasters were all over; five attempts to make specific antibodies miserably failed sucking up lots of money and time.

The -in a way- funniest disaster was that while our antibody was being produced in big furry white rabbits – the plant in Kansas was hit by a tornado. I could only imagine endless Kansas fields full of hopping white rabbits filled with millions of dollars of anti-bodies and nobody knowing which one was which…

Teaming up with Jonathan Brewer, BMB

In 2012 we had a lot of data but still hadn’t identified the motor proteins, which I found to be critical for the whole story.

Another piece of missing information was how fast the muscles could pump calcium. For this high speed calcium imaging was needed in the cells and I vaguely remember that it was at a faculty Christmas lunch that I got to talk to Jonathan Brewer (Memphys, BMB) who could do this.

Running back and forth between Biology and Memphys in 2012 I incidentally and most importantly also met my wife.

Teaming up with Iris Adam in Berlin

In 2015 things were starting to come together, we gave up on proteins but a postdoc in Irina’s group – Nerea Osinalde - analyzed mRNA in the cells and this immediately gave the results we expected; MYH13 or extraocular myosin was present in songbird superfast muscle.

Following another hunch we decided to look at MYH13 during song learning in songbirds. We got tissue from Iris Adam from Berlin (she is currently a DFF funded postdoc in my group) and found that MYH13 was upregulated.

This was a very exciting finding because it could mean that muscle training played a role in its expression but only when also the speed of the muscles increased.

This last piece of the puzzle was confirmed by Michiel Vellema – also a postdoc in my group. Now we had all the data and the writing could begin…

Dreading a potential walk of shame

In June 2016, we submitted the paper to Nature Communications, who after two arduously slow review rounds with 5 reviewers, taking almost a year, declined our paper in April 2017. One of the reviewers managed to ask 55 new questions in round two leading to a lovely 31-page rebuttal (single spaced, Arial size 10)!

Dreading a potential walk of shame, we were thrilled that eLife accepted and published our paper within a few months.

A stronger, integrative piece of physiology

So nine years after the start, we have a few small grants leading to only one single paper, but one I am very proud of. We could have written several smaller papers in the meantime, but now we present a much stronger, integrative piece of physiology, that to quote a colleague’s reaction “is an instant classic and a wonderful paper for teaching”.

It is often difficult to know what all our colleagues at SDU do and are good at. I think this project is a great example how meeting SDU colleagues at random social events can initiate fun scientific collaborations from bottom-up that result in fantastic interdisciplinary work. In the end, it is our common interest that drives our work.

Disclaimer: To our best knowledge no PhD students were harmed in the process of data collection or writing the paper.