Again, smart little things:
Usually, each cell has exactly one nucleus. But the cells of our skeletal muscles are different: These long, fibrous cells have a comparatively large cytoplasm that contains hundreds of nuclei. But up to now, we have known very little about the extent to which the nuclei of a single muscle fiber differ from each other in terms of their gene activity, and what effect this has on the function of the muscle.
A team led by Professor Carmen Birchmeier, head of the research group on Developmental Biology / Signal Transduction at the Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC), has now unlocked some of the secrets contained in these muscle cell nuclei. As the researchers report in the journal Nature Communications, the team investigated the gene expression of cell nuclei using a still quite novel technique called single-nucleus RNA sequencing — and in the process, they came across an unexpectedly high variety of genetic activity.
“Due to the heterogeneity of its nuclei, a single muscle cell can act almost like a tissue, which consists of a variety of very different cell types,” explains Dr. Minchul Kim, a postdoctoral researcher in Birchmeier’s team and one of the two lead authors of the study. “This enables the cell to fulfill its numerous tasks, like communicating with neurons or producing certain muscle proteins.”
Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association, “Muscle cell secrets” at ScienceDaily
See also: Cells activate individual quality control responses Researcher: “Integrated stress response is like a city going through full lockdown,” Yan said. “If you only have 10 cases, you don’t want to come out and tell the city, ‘Let’s just hunker down and not do anything,’ or shut down all the productivity. You want the city to have a system to evaluate the severity of the stress — and to deal with it according to its severity.