Medicine, Health Care One Gene Closer to Regenerative…
Published: June 2, 2017.
Released by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
CINCINNATI – A detour on the road to regenerative medicine for people with muscular disorders is figuring out how to coax muscle stem cells to fuse together and form functioning skeletal muscle tissues. A study published June 1 by Nature Communications reports scientists identify a new gene essential to this process, shedding new light on possible new therapeutic strategies.
Led by researchers at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center Heart Institute, the study demonstrates the gene Gm7325 and its protein – which the scientists named “myomerger” – prompt muscle stem cells to fuse and develop skeletal muscles the body needs to move and survive. They also show that myomerger works with another gene, Tmem8c, and its associated protein “myomaker” to fuse cells that normally would not.
In laboratory tests on embryonic mice engineered to not express myomerger in skeletal muscle, the animals did not develop enough muscle fiber to live.
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