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05.12.2016

After consuming gelatine hydroxyprolylglycine makes your muscles bigger and stronger

The dipeptide hydroxyprolylglycine, which appears in your blood after you've eaten gelatine or collagen, probably has an anabolic effect. It stimulates the formation of muscle fibres - and makes them bigger and stronger. Researchers at Osaka Prefecture University write about this in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications.

Hydroxyprolylglycine
Hydroxyprolylglycine [structural formula shown below] is a dipeptide that consists of a hydroxylproline part and a glycine part. It's the most important metabolite that appears in the blood after people have eaten gelatine or a hydrolysed collagen peptide. [J Agric Food Chem. 2005 Aug 10;53(16):6531-6.]

Japanese researchers suspect that the positive effects of collagen and gelatine supplementation on bone health [Biochem Biophys Res Commun. 2014 Oct 24;453(3):498-501], joints [Osteoarthritis Cartilage. 2009 Dec;17(12):1620-7.] and skin [Biochem Biophys Res Commun. 2014 Oct 24;453(3):498-501.] are to a large extent the work of hydroxyprolylglycine.

Study
In 2015 German researchers reported that supplementation with collagen strengthened the effects of strength training on muscle mass and strength. The Japanese researchers wandered whether this effect also had something to do with hydroxyprolylglycine. They exposed young muscle cells to increasing concentrations of hydroxyprolylglycine in a test tube and then watched what happened.

The researchers were sponsored by Nitta Gelatin [nitta-gelatin.com], a manufacturer of collagen peptides.

Results
As a result of the presence of hydroxyprolylglycine, the muscle cells joined together faster to make muscle fibres. Scientifically speaking, the fusion index increased, as the figure on the left below shows. The dipeptide also made the muscle fibres bigger [right below]. The combination of the separate amino acids glycine and hydroxyproline had no effect.

In addition, the Japanese researchers found more of the contracting muscle protein myosin heavy chain [MyHC] in the muscle cells that had been exposed to hydroxyprolylglycine. Once again, the combination of the separate amino acids glycine and hydroxyproline had no effect.

The researchers discovered that hydroxyprolylglycine activated the anabolic signal molecules Akt, mTOR and p70S6K.

The anabolic effect of hydroxyprolylglycine decreased slightly when the researchers added histidine to the test tubes. They suspect that histidine and hydroxyprolylglycine enter muscle cells in the same way – via the peptide histidine transporter 1 [PHT1]. The figure below shows this.

Conclusion
The Japanese believe that their research results might be interesting for strength athletes and supplements manufacturers that develop products for strength athletes. "The present results demonstrate that hydroxyprolylglycine promotes hypertrophy during myogenic differentiation", the researchers wrote. "It has recently been reported that a combination of collagen peptide supplementation and resistance training increases muscle strength in elderly men with sarcopenia."

"Future studies should address whether hydroxyprolylglycine administration can positively impact muscle growth when combined with resistance exercise."

"Overall, when considered together with these studies, our data suggest that hydroxyprolylglycine might be a promising dietary supplement to support repair of damaged skeletal muscle or to increase skeletal muscle mass by inducing hypertrophy."

Source:
Biochem Biophys Res Commun. 2016 Sep 23;478(3):1292-7.

More:
Over seventies who do strength training will build more muscle by taking a collagen supplement 03.12.2015
The anticatabolic effect of glycine 23.06.2014

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