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Sep 27, 2023

Gene Targeting Turns Mice into Long-Distance Runners

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Running could be for everyone even at Olympic levels with biocomputing and crispr.


Citation: (2004) Gene Targeting Turns Mice into Long-Distance Runners. PLoS Biol 2(10): e322. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.

Copyright: © 2004 Public Library of Science. This is an open-access distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Have you ever noticed that long-distance runners and sprinters seem specially engineered for their sports? One’s built for distance, the other speed. The ability to generate quick bursts of power or sustain long periods of exertion depends primarily on your muscle fiber type ratio (muscle cells are called fibers), which depends on your genes. To this extent, elite athletes are born, not made. No matter how hard you train or how many performance-enhancing drugs you take, if you’re not blessed with the muscle composition of a sprinter, you’re not going to break the 100-meter world record in your lifetime. (In case you’d like to try, that’s 9.78 seconds for a man and 10.49 seconds for a woman.)

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