Abstract
During homeostasis and after injury, adult muscle stem cells (MuSCs) activate to mediate muscle regeneration. However, much remains unclear regarding the heterogeneous capacity of MuSCs for self-renewal and regeneration. Here, we show that Lin28a is expressed in embryonic limb bud muscle progenitors, and that a rare reserve subset of Lin28a+Pax7– skeletal MuSCs can respond to injury at adult stage by replenishing the Pax7+ MuSC pool to drive muscle regeneration. Compared with adult Pax7+ MuSCs, Lin28a+ MuSCs displayed enhanced myogenic potency in vitro and in vivo upon transplantation. The epigenome of adult Lin28a+ MuSCs showed resemblance to embryonic muscle progenitors. In addition, RNA-sequencing revealed that Lin28a+ MuSCs co-expressed higher levels of certain embryonic limb bud transcription factors, telomerase components and the p53 inhibitor Mdm4, and lower levels of myogenic differentiation markers compared to adult Pax7+ MuSCs, resulting in enhanced self-renewal and stress-response signatures. Functionally, conditional ablation and induction of Lin28a+ MuSCs in adult mice revealed that these cells are necessary and sufficient for efficient muscle regeneration. Together, our findings connect the embryonic factor Lin28a to adult stem cell self-renewal and juvenile regeneration.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the CAS (XDA16010109), the National Key R&D Program of China (2019YFA0801700), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (91957202), and the Key Research Program of the CAS (KJZD-SW-L04). N.S.-C. is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) International Scholar.
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P.W. and X.L. designed and performed the experiments. P.W., X.L. and N.S.-C. wrote the manuscript. L. Guo helped with various experiments and mouse husbandry. J.-H.E.T., M.-W.J.C. and Y.-J.B.C. helped with HSKM and LTS cell experiments. L.L. helped with cryosection and immunofluorescence experiments. S.M. helped with Western blot experiments. W.C. helped with qRT-PCR experiments. W.M., N.A., Y.L. and L.J. helped with bioinformatics analysis. Z.Y., Y.C., K.L., L. Guang, Y.W., H.Z., R.R.W. and C.L. provided technical assistance. L.Z. and S.L. helped with mouse sampling. B.T.T., K.Y. and N.S.-C. designed and supervised the overall project.
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Wang, P., Liu, X., Yao, Z. et al. Lin28a maintains a subset of adult muscle stem cells in an embryonic-like state. Cell Res 33, 712–726 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41422-023-00818-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41422-023-00818-y