Skeletal Muscle Bioengineering

Ah, the marvel of muscle! Your skeletal muscle tissue allows you to walk, smile, and breathe. When you want to move, your brain sends signals via motor neurons to the neuromuscular junction where a burst of acetylcholine is released. This in turn actives a cascade of calcium within each skeletal muscle fiber invoking tiny molecular motors to crawl along cords of actin protein and produce a coordinated contraction of your muscle. As if this weren’t enough, when skeletal muscle is injured, muscle stem cells residing in the tissue are called to action to restore muscle form and function.

There are a number of situations where skeletal muscle health declines. For example, with age, skeletal muscle progressively becomes weak, and can lose the ability to self-repair after an injury. Loss of skeletal muscle mass and function also arises from genetic conditions (e.g. Duchenne muscular dystrophy), time spent in the intensive care unit (ICU-acquired weakness), and many other causes. The goal of Gilbert Lab research is to find ways to restore muscle function by harnessing the potential of muscle stem cells. We do this by working to understand what controls muscle stem cells in health, and how this changes in disease, and then we test potential treatments - discovered in our research - in miniature culture models of human skeletal muscle that we engineer in a dish.