Concerning consequences of blocking Notch signaling in satellite muscle stem cells

Stem cell (SC) research holds the promise of controlling and/or curing a variety of diseases. SC applications include cell therapy, disease modeling, and developmental biology. This commentary focuses on an important study that examined Notch signaling in murine satellite muscle SCs (Lin et al., 2013). The results highlight the possible serious side effects of NOTCH inhibitors, a class of targeted drugs that are being examined for treating a variety of cancers (Krop et al., 2012). Skeletal muscles, unlikemany other tissues, possess a unique regenerative capacity (Shi and Garry, 2006). Many researchers believe that this unique feature may be the key to treating myopathies, other degenerative diseases, and cancer (Jackson et al., 2010). Much of the regenerative potential of muscle depends on a population of SCs called satellite cells (Le Grand and Rudnicki, 2007). The maintenance of stemness in adult SC is regulated by two main factors: the “SC niche” and the stemness regulatory pathways. Stemness regulatory pathways