Muscle Trouble

When you’re pumping iron in the gym, a little pool of cells is working overtime to produce the material needed for your expanding physique. And when you injure yourself over-doing it, that same group, the muscle satellite cells, provide the necessary resupply of healthy cells. How these starter cells know when to burst into action isn’t well understood. One factor involved is a protein called PLK1, but it's proved hard to study. A new approach blocked its activity in mouse muscle cells. These mice developed normally but their muscles couldn’t heal when injured (pictured one week after injury, with new cells in red). Without PLK1, the resupply cells got stuck before duplicating and ultimately self-destructed. The cells divide more slowly in older people, so deciphering how they’re regulated might help improve elderly injury recovery and might have implications for patients who currently take PLK1 blockers to counter cancer.

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 from work by Zhihao Jia and Yaohui Nie, and colleagues
• Department of Animal Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, August 2019