Laboratory of Muscle and Nerve

Skeletal muscle is important not only to maintain bone articulation but is essential for locomotion. A cerebral vascular accident (stroke) induces severe muscle wasting and weakness, which results in a loss of physical activity and independence in stroke patients. However, the molecular mechanisms that regulate muscle wasting in stroke are poorly studied. Understanding such mechanisms will open a new path to develop therapeutic strategies to prevent or minimize the loss of muscle mass in stroke survivors. Moreover, both symmetric and asymmetric cell divisions of muscle stem cells play an essential role in the muscle regeneration and repair process. Investigating the molecular mechanisms that regulate muscle stem cell division in a timely manner will provide a new path for a therapeutic strategy to treat various genetic and acquired degenerative muscle disorders. Since skeletal muscle is a major site of lipid and glucose oxidation, the maintenance of muscle metabolically activity muscle is critical for whole-body energy homeostasis and for preventing metabolic disorders like diabetes and obesity. It has been shown that mitochondrial impairment significantly contributes to skeletal muscle metabolic dysfunction and understanding the mechanisms of mitochondrial impairment has enormous potential for the development of novel therapies for treating muscle metabolic disorders.