Grant: Operating Grant

The repair of skeletal muscle after injury depends on the function of undifferentiated muscle precursor cells called satellite cells. Satellite cells are undifferentiated and deeply quiescent in healthy tissue. Upon injury, they become activated, engage in rapid proliferation, and eventually differentiate into mature, contractile muscle cells to repair the damaged muscle, while a small fraction of the cells will self-renew by avoiding differentiation and returning to the quiescent state. Two key problems in the field are that we don't fully understand how these fates (quiescence, activation, differentiation, self-renewal) are established, or what mechanisms determine which fate a cell will adopt. Our research is addressing these fundamental questions. Using a combination of functional genomics, bioinformatics and molecular biology techniques, in vivo and in cultured muscle cells, we are studying how gene regulatory proteins Six1 and Six4 control muscle precursor/satellite cell function. We focus on how they control the proliferation and differentiation of muscle precursors, and look into molecular details how they accomplish this task.