Project title: Autophagy control of glycogen in skeletal muscle
This year, the AMDA was fortunate to receive 13 grant applications focusing on both clinical research and basic science. It has been a challenge to select one.
Dr. Wyant was chosen because he has embarked on a discovery project aimed at solving a missing piece of the puzzle: how does glycogen enter the lysosomes? A presumptive pathway for glycogen traffic to the lysosome is autophagy – a familiar term in Pompe disease research. In fact, one of the canonical images describing the disease illustrates glycogen transport to the lysosome in a vesicle (autophagosome) that is formed during autophagy. Although the concept of glycogen autophagy, called glycophagy, recently gained a lot of interest, the mechanism of muscle glycogen entrapment into the autophagosome has eluded the researchers for a long time.
The team developed a novel sophisticated approach to directly follow glycogen trafficking to the lysosome in skeletal muscle. The proposed study holds promise to identify a protein(s) that bind to glycogen and anchors it to the autophagosomal membrane. The implications of this discovery could be manipulated, so that less glycogen is delivered to the lysosomes, thus limiting damage to the muscle cells.
The application scored highest for novelty and scientific depth. We welcome Dr. Wyant and his team to the Pompe community.
