Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have turned back the clock on mature muscle tissue, coaxing it back to an earlier stem cell stage to form new muscle. Moreover, they showed in mice that the newly reprogrammed muscle stem cells could be used to help repair damaged tissue.

The achievement, described in the journal Chemistry & Biology, "opens the door to the development of new treatments to combat the degeneration of muscle associated with muscular dystrophy or aging," said study principal investigator Irina Conboy, UC Berkeley assistant professor of bioengineering.

The Allen Institute for Brain Science announced today the discovery of a new class of cells in the spinal cord that act like neural stem cells, offering a fresh avenue in the search for therapies to treat spinal cord injury and disease. The published collaborative study, authored by scientists from the University of British Columbia, the Allen Institute for Brain Science and The Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University and titled "Adult Spinal Cord Radial Glia Display a Unique Progenitor Phenotype," appears in the open access journal PLoS One.