Overview

 

Muscles are extremely used in our daily life. To work properly they need to be continuously maintained and regenerated. This remarkable regenerative capability is mainly due to a resident muscle stem cells (MuSC) population, also known as Satellite Cells. These cells are dormant but can be activated to restore the damaged muscles. We are particularly interested in understanding how MuSC behave upon injury and what are the genes controlling their behavior.

 

For our research, we use Drosophila as a model, which has long been a fruitful paradigm to study myogenesis; both the muscle structure and core myogenic programs being highly conserved between flies and mammals. MuSCs have recently been identified in the flies and we developed novel transgenic tools and imaging approaches to both in vivo track MuSCs and identify genes regulating their behavior.