Advances in Muscle Stem Cells and Development

Dear Colleagues,

Muscle stem cells (MuSCs) are the resident stem cells in skeletal muscle tissues. They derive from myogenic precursors during development and gradually settle in the adult muscle niche along the course of muscle growth and homeostasis. MuSCs stay quiescent under normal conditions, while they could be activated upon injury and stress to regenerate and repair the tissue. During regeneration, a subset of them also returns to quiescence to sustain the stem cell pool, a quintessential character of adult stem cells. MuSCs’ function relates to homeostasis and a lot of myopathies, including atrophy, muscular dystrophy, and aging. Not surprisingly, they hold great therapeutic value and potential. Although signaling pathways, metabolism, and epigenetic remodeling intrinsic to MuSCs were proved to be essential to the fate and functions of them, more recent studies suggested that other cell types in the muscle tissue, such as fibro/adipogenic progenitors (FAPs), endothelial cells, and macrophages, also send critical signals to regulate their function during regeneration. With advances in deep sequencing, more and more transcriptomics, epigenomics, and multi-omics data with single-cell resolution or with spatial context on MuSCs have come out in the last five years. This provides a larger blueprint to study and test MuSCs under different physiological conditions and aging. It has never been this exciting to gain knowledge on the field of muscle biology and to test new ways to treat muscle diseases. Therefore, in this Special Issue, we invite labs to submit their new discoveries and review recent advances and perspectives in the field of muscle stem cells to extend our knowledge on this subject.

Dr. Xuesong Feng
Guest Editor

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• muscle stem cells
• development
• myogenesis
• regeneration
• myopathies