Harvard Neuromuscular Disease Project

Project 4 

The Gussoni Laboratory

Gene expression in, and therapeutic application of, muscle stem cells.

The long-term goals of this project are to isolate and characterize stem cells from human skeletal muscle, and test their ability to correct muscular deficiencies in-vivo. These studies will require the use of the fluorescence-activated cell sorter and microarray techniques to purify human muscle cells and identify the genes they specifically express. Human muscle stem cells will be introduced into the circulation of different animal models of muscle disorders and their ability to target and repair damaged muscle will be assessed.

Aims:

• To optimize the isolation of muscle stem cells (SP cells) in humans.
• To use chip-based mRNA expression arrays to identify genes expressed by human muscle SP cells.
• To analyze candidate genes from gene chip technology using other conventional techniques.
• To optimize conditions to propagate and culture human SP cells in vitro.
• To evaluate the differentiation potential of human muscle SP cells in vivo.