Joana Esteves de Lima, Shaping Life 2, Conférence en ligne, 7-9 Avril 2021

Shaping Life 2

→ Boarding Pass

Postdoc, Mondor Institut for Biomedical Research (IMRB), Créteil

– Article en Anglais  –

The Shaping Life 2 meeting took place online due to covid pandemics circumstances but this did not interfere with the quality of the talks or with the event organization capacity to still promote interaction between attendees. From this meeting I would like to highlight the beautiful talk given by Qiyan Mao from Schnorrer’s lab. Given my background on skeletal muscle research I believe the questions behind this project arose a lot of my interest. The project was on the study of in vitro myogenic cell differentiation and maturation starting from iPSC. The main question was how myotubes in culture can form sarcomeres without the presence of attachment cues (resulting from, for example, tendons and connective tissues in vivo). Qiyan nicely showed that sarcomere formation occurs in vitro after 1) muscle cells elongate to self-limited stable length; 2) immature myofiber bundles fuse between each other decreasing the number of foci (bundle attachment points); and finally, 3) a stable myofiber bundle number is reached in culture which coincides with sarcomere organization. To show if the stretching from the attachment points of the myofiber bundles was associated with sarcomere maturation, the tension of myotubes cut at different maturation phases was analysed, associating high tension with mature fibers and low tension with myotubes. I hope to hear more from this story soon as the study is still ongoing!

Overall the meeting was very nice and interactive despite the virtual constrains.

→ Joana presented a poster entitled: « The role of histones chaperones HIRA and DAXX during muscle development »