Muscle Power
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Clarissa Henry, left, with undergraduate Chelsi Snow, is studying the molecular signals that prompt muscle fibers to elongate and attach to tendons on the skeleton.

To help find treatments for diseases like muscular dystrophy or traumatic muscle injury, researchers must first understand how muscle forms during early development.

One of the best way to do that, says University of Maine Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences Clarissa Henry, is to watch how muscle develops in transparent zebrafish embryos. In particular, Henry is looking at the two kinds of fibers — slow twitch and fast twitch — found in skeletal muscles. It's in these fibers that a molecular signaling process takes place, enabling short, round cells to suddenly elongate and attach to tendons, propelling force to the skeleton.

"We're studying how round cells become long, and how long cells both initiate and maintain the critical attachment to a tendon," says Henry, who came to UMaine a year ago from the University of California – Berkeley, where she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Miller Institute.

At Berkeley, Henry and her colleagues documented the first example of zebrafish slow muscle cells inducing a wave of fast muscle morphogenesis or differentiation.

"We still don't know what the signal is, but we know what cell it's coming from, and now we can start to ask questions about the molecular mechanisms that tell precursor cells to be active, functional muscle fibers," Henry says. The hope is that in five years, some of the molecular signals in the muscle cells will be identified.