Building Muscle

Our bodies are remarkably good at repairing themselves, even if it doesn’t always feel that way when your ankle still hurts weeks after a sprain. Skeletal muscle, those connected to our bones, are particularly good at self-repair, with constant damage and rebuilding at the heart of their strengthening process. However, even this has its limits, and severe injuries can cause irreparable damage. To help recover from these setbacks, researchers have engineered artificial scaffolds to support rebuilding. Crucially, a new technique uses nano-patterned scaffolds to help lend structure to the process, with muscle tissue regrowing in aligned patterns (top right) on an orderly scaffold (bottom right), just like real muscle, compared to haphazard growth on a disordered base (left) in experiments with injured mice. The researchers hope that these tests might provide a springboard for new approaches to regenerative tissue engineering, to help give the body’s repair systems a boost.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image adapted from work by Karina H. Nakayama and colleagues
• Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, Palo Alto, CA, USA
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications BIOLOGY, May 2019