ISSN exercise & sport nutrition review: research & recommendations

Sports nutrition is a constantly evolving field with hundreds of research papers published annually. For this reason, keeping up to date with the literature is often difficult. This paper is a five year update of the sports nutrition review article published as the lead paper to launch the JISSN in 2004 and presents a well-referenced overview of the current state of the science related to how to optimize training and athletic performance through nutrition. More specifically, this paper provides an overview of: 1.) The definitional category of ergogenic aids and dietary supplements; 2.) How dietary supplements are legally regulated; 3.) How to evaluate the scientific merit of nutritional supplements; 4.) General nutritional strategies to optimize performance and enhance recovery; and, 5.) An overview of our current understanding of the ergogenic value of nutrition and dietary supplementation in regards to weight gain, weight loss, and performance enhancement. Our hope is that ISSN members and individuals interested in sports nutrition find this review useful in their daily practice and consultation with their clients

The Tubular Sheaths Encasing Methanosaeta thermophila Filaments Are Functional Amyloids

Archaea are renowned for their ability to thrive in extreme environments, although they can be found in virtually all habitats. Their adaptive success is linked to their unique cell envelopes that are extremely resistant to chemical and thermal denaturation and that resist proteolysis by common proteases. Here we employ amyloid-specific conformation antibodies and biophysical techniques to show that the extracellular cell wall sheaths encasing the methanogenic archaea Methanosaeta thermophila PT are functional amyloids. Depolymerization of sheaths and subsequent MS/MS analyses revealed that the sheaths are composed of a single major sheath protein (MspA). The amyloidogenic nature of MspA was confirmed by in vitro amyloid formation of recombinant MspA under a wide range of environmental conditions. This is the first report of a functional amyloid from the archaeal domain of life. The amyloid nature explains the extreme resistance of the sheath, the elastic properties that allow diffusible substrates to penetrate through expandable hoop boundaries, and how the sheaths are able to split and elongate outside the cell. The archaeal sheath amyloids do not share homology with any of the currently known functional amyloids and clearly represent a new function of the amyloid protein fold