Cytosolic Proteostatic Adaptation to Mitochondrial Stress Causes Progressive Muscle Wasting

Purpose: Muscle wasting (or atrophy) occurs in primary neuromuscular diseases and during aging, with sarcopenia affecting 35.4% and 75.5% of women and man over 60 years of age. Mitochondrial dysfunction is proposed to contribute to muscle wasting. Here, we show that chronic adaptation to mitochondrial Precursor Over-accumulation Stress (mPOS) causes muscle wasting. mPOS is a newly discovered cell stress mechanism caused by the saturation or damage of the mitochondrial protein import machinery, which consequently leads to the toxic accumulation of precursor proteins in the cytosol. Methods: We generated transgenic mice with a two-fold increase of Ant1, an adenine nucleotide translocase involved in ATP/ADP exchange on the inner mitochondrial membrane (IMM). We found that these animals progressively lose muscle mass. At two years of age, the skeletal muscle becomes barely quantifiable, without affecting the overall lifespan. We then performed whole-transcriptome RNA-sequencing on skeletal muscle samples of male and female mice at 6 months of age. Results: After alignment and quantification, we show that the ANT1-transgenic muscles have a drastically remodeled transcriptome that represses protein synthesis, and stimulates proteasomal function, autophagy, lysosomal amplification and Gadd45a-signaling. These four processes are all known to promote muscle wasting. Conclusions: These results suggest that chronic proteostatic adaptation to mPOS is a robust mechanism of muscle wasting, and it leads to or depends in part on a robust set of transcriptional adaptations. This finding may help the understanding of how mitochondria contribute to muscle wasting during aging. It may also have implications for diseases that are associated with ANT1 overexpression. Overall design: Skeletal muscle mRNA profiles of 6-month old wild type (WT) and Ant1 transgenic overexpressing mice were generated by stranded paired-end RNA sequencing, in quadruplicate, using Illumina NextSeq500.