A new method allows large quantities of muscle stem cells to be safely obtained in cell culture. This provides a potential for treating patients with muscle diseases -- and for those who would like to eat meat, but don't want to kill animals.
ETH Zurich Professor Ori Bar-Nur and his team grow muscle cells in the laboratory. In this case, they are mouse cells, but the researchers are also interested in human and cow cells.
For now, however, the ETH team's research is focused on optimising the generation of muscle stem cells and making it safer. They have now succeeded in doing so via a new approach.Like other researchers in the field, the scientists at ETH Zurich use a different, easier to grow cell type as the starting material for generating muscle cells: connective tissue cells.
An important component of the used cocktail -- and a central catalyst for cell transformation -- is the protein MyoD. This is a transcription factor which regulates the activity of certain muscle genes in the cell nucleus. MyoD is not normally present in connective tissue cells. Before these cells can turn into muscle cells, scientists have to coax them to produce MyoD in their nucleus for several days.
The ETH Zurich scientists injected non-defective muscle stem cells into the muscles of Duchenne muscular dystrophy mice carrying this defect. They were able to show that the healthy stem cells form repaired muscle fibres in the muscles.
Finally, Bar-Nur and his team would like to incorporate their new findings into their ongoing work with cow cells -- another research stream of the lab. They hope this method would assist current efforts to culture animal muscle stem cells for cultivated meat production, an alternative method to produce meat for consumption.
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