Chris awarded Marzolf Award

I would like to announce that Christopher Tastad has been awarded a 2008-2009 Marzolf Award from the Marzolf Foundation which is supporting the Paul and Sheila Wellstone Muscular Dystrophy Center in University of Minnesota. Chris is currently a sophomore student majoring in Biochemistry. His project title is "Analysis of GADD45 gene function during muscle stem cell differentiation". He will investigate the role of GADD45 in muscle stem cell self-renewal and differentiation. He has been working hard and already obtained some interesting results. His findings will be applied for future cell-based therapy for muscular dystrophy. This is a great start for his medical scientific career as a pre-med undergraduate student. Congratulations to Chris!

Is MyoD the case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for myogenesis?

MyoD is a muscle-specific transcription factor that plays essential roles in muscle satellite cell differentiation and regeneration. We have demonstrated that myoblasts derived from MyoD-/- satellite cells engrafted with significantly higher efficacy compared to wild-type myoblasts after injection into regenerating muscle and infarcted heart. MyoD-/- myoblasts were revealed to possess remarkable resistance to apoptosis and increased survival during differentiation and after apoptotic inductions, compared to wild-type myoblasts. Therefore, these data suggest that MyoD is not only regulating myogenic determination and differentiation (Dr. Jekyll) but also regulating apoptotic cell death (Mr. Hyde) during muscle development. In addition, down-regulation of MyoD expression may be required for maintenance of self-renewing muscle stem cells. Furthermore, our data offer evidence for novel therapeutic stem cell transplantation for muscular dystrophy, in which suppression of MyoD in myogenic progenitor cells would be beneficial to the therapy by providing a selective advantage for expansion of the stem cells. This project was published in recent PNAS and introduced in Faculty of 1000.