School of Science Division of Life Science 14 Molecular Regulation of Skeletal Muscle Stem Cell Quiescence and Activation Supervisor: CHEUNG, Tom / LIFS Student: SINCE, Alec Victor / BIBU Course: UROP1100, Spring This study aimed to investigate the role of CPEB4 in regard to senescence in skeletal muscle stem cells. As previous research suggested, the decrease in CPEB4 level is correlated with the aging of cells due to its effect on mitochondrial-related translation. We used FACS to sort and isolate satellite cells from the hindlimb muscles of mutant CPEB4-P2A-RFP and Pax7-GFP mice to carry out various assays to confirm the correlation between CPEB4 level decrease and senescence. Further studies are required to confirm why there seems to be a low efficiency of CPEB4-P2A-RFP expression in the transgenic mouse model that we used to carry out this study. Molecular Regulation of Skeletal Muscle Stem Cell Quiescence and Activation Supervisor: CHEUNG, Tom / LIFS Student: SHIN, June Yeol / BIOT Course: UROP1100, Fall Muscle Satellite cells (MuSC) which function to regenerate into myofibers upon muscle damage can also be isolated and cultured for different purposes. An example of such purpose that is recently gaining increased attention is to culture MuSC into differentiated myofibers in vitro for human consumption as cultured meat. For this purpose, several traits such as fast growth rates, ability to form longer and thicker myotubes upon differentiation may be advantageous traits. Therefore, to determine whether specific genes may be responsible for particular phenotypical differences, MuSC from Diversity Outbred (DO) mice strains were isolated then cultured toward differentiation. Any difference in phenotype may be compared against the genome of the DO mice to uncover genes that may play an important role for differentiation. Construction of a Signal Transduction Pathway Reporter Indicator for Monitoring Signaling Strength Supervisor: CHOW, King Lau / LIFS Student: PARK, Jihye / BIOT Course: UROP1100, Fall UROP2100, Spring The bone morphogenetic proteins, a class of TGF- β family, have conserved roles in the bone development and body patterning of many vertebrates and invertebrates. Although much of the basis of the signalling mechanism is understood, there is still a lack of information on the target genes of this signalling pathway. This research focuses on C08E3.13 gene found in Caenorhabditis elegans, previously reported by the paper “Identification of transforming growth factor-beta-regulated genes in Caenorhabditis elegans by differential hybridisation of arrayed cDNAs” (Mochii et al., 1999) to be differentially regulated by the growth factor-β (TGF-β) family. According to the paper, C08E3.13 expression has shown to decrease in mutant C. elegans with mutations in the dbl-1 and sma-2 genes that encode the component of TGF-β signalling pathway and TGF-beta ligand required for activating the TGF-beta signalling pathway and an increase in lon-2 mutant with a defective negative regulator of TGF- β signalling, showing that C08E3.13 may be regulated by the TGF-β pathway. The final goal of this project is to re-create this experiment results by constructing and injecting a fused plasmid of a reporter gene and the promoter of C08E3.13.
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