No, nothing more than the standard high school biology, and two college level human anatomy/physiology courses, but that was all 25 years ago. If you want to take some courses, MIT offers 'free' courses here:
Free Online Course Materials | MIT OpenCourseWare
I started my 'education' regarding diet back in August of last year. Then I discovered intermittent fasting, which made me do more research. Then, for my New Year's Resolutions, I decided on two things: I wanted the body back that I had when I was 18 years old, and I would try supplements (but no prohormones or AAs). A stupidly simple thing led me to dig really deep into protein metabolism. That was:
Whey is a fast protein. It's absorbed at 10 grams per hour.
And I thought to myself, "Holy crap, I've screwed myself with intermittent fasting! A six-hour eating window and 10 grams an hour meant I was only getting 60 grams of protein a day! And that's if I chowed down on whey, how 'fast' is meat protein? No wonder Martin of leangains dotcom fame recommends BCAAs, he HAS to or there's no way you could get enough protein!"
That's when I really dug in and researched the whole digestive process (did you know BCAAs are actually absorbed more slowly than whey or casein?). And I've been reading up on it ever since. So my education in that area is all self-taught, and only since January of this year (roughly about the time I joined these forums).
Sadly, I don't bookmark all the good stuff I find. I generally look for specific information, and when I find it I learn it and I'm done, although I generally DO try and cross-check my facts, since there's so much misinformation floating around on the web. The cool thing is that very often I find information I *wasn't* looking for, that happens to be useful, like about the speed of BCAAs. However I've found that some surprisingly simple questions can't be answered, or haven't been studied.
Ok, here's my methodology.
First stop, Wikipedia: WNT7A - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ok, looks like it's the name of a gene that controls a lot of female development, and is possibly tied to a tendency toward cancer. Seems to have a big influence on estrogen.
Scrolling down to the further reading section on Wikipedia, I saw this link:
Functional characterization of WNT7A signaling i... [J Biol Chem. 2003] - PubMed - NCBI
and this: Wnt-7a up-regulates matrix metalloproteinase-12 ... [J Biol Chem. 2005] - PubMed - NCBI
Ok, so there's this "WNT Family" of genes, which seem to control limb and some sex organ formation, and seem to be involved in some healing processes (makes sense, the body needs a pattern to grow back to), let's look at them.
Wnt signaling pathway - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Interesting, seems they're involved in morphogenic signaling (how tissues become different at different places in the body). Ok, that confirms my idea on how they're involved in healing. But wound healing... and cell type differentiation... sounds like it might be involved in Type IIa/b muscle fiber differentiation and/or the growth process following microtrauma. Let's see what I can find.
Wheeee! Bingo!: MDA / Quest Extra / WNT7a Protein Boosts Muscle Repair
OK, a little more keyword searching yielded this article: Skeletal Muscle | Full text | The myogenic kinome: protein kinases critical to mammalian skeletal myogenesis
Ok, so without spending a week reading and researching, it looks like this is mainly associated with forming new parts of the body during fetal development, with some additional involvement in wound repair. It might be of interest to bodybuilders looking to stimulate faster recovery, however because it's linked to cancer genesis, I'd say it's something I personally probably wouldn't be too interested in. Activating genes when they aren't supposed to be can have some serious unintended consequences. Like if you thought gynecomastia was bad, how much worse would it be if you started growing a uterus, or wound up with male breast cancer. Then again, there might be no danger, I don't have enough knowledge of genomics to really make a good call, but better safe than sorry, I say.
