Satellite cells are adult stem cells that are present in all skeletal muscle tissue, and are responsible for repair, regeneration, and replacement of all skeletal muscle over an entire lifetime. want to know how these cells, which are both quite small and very rare within the tissue, are competent to respond to either a systemic insult (such as disease) or an acute trauma by doing exactly what is needed, when it is needed, where it is needed. When muscle is injured, satellite cells will leave the quiescent state that they are normally held in, proliferate extensively to form a population of differentiation-competent myoblasts, migrate to the site(s) where repair is needed, and then differentiate and fuse to precisely and efficiently restore muscle

patterning and function. The signaling environment they would be exposed to over the course of an injury would be both very complex and very dynamic, derived from multiple different resident cell types as well as invading immune cells. How do satellite cells correctly interpret the plethora of stimuli they encounter, and integrate it into appropriate cellular activity? Our work on the the role of signaling receptors expressed on the surface of satellite cells, and how their signals are coordinated, is aimed at answering this overarching question.

Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy is the most common lethal inherited disease, affecting as many as 1 in every 2,500 live births. Affected children become progressively weaker as their muscles are damaged by everyday use, and are not repaired or replaced adequately. Other muscular dystrophies also exist, many of which, like Duchenne’s, are believed to involve decreased capacity of the patient’s satellite cells to deal with the physiological stresses of the