Skeletal muscle repairs itself through a cycle most people never think about. A small reserve of stem cells sits dormant between muscle fibers, wakes up when tissue is damaged, multiplies, rebuilds the injured fiber, and then sends part of the population back to sleep so the reserve is not spent.
Researchers at Penn Medicine have identified a protein that appears to coordinate that cycle, and it is one nobody expected to find doing this job. TRF2 has been studied for years as a guardian of telomeres, the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes.
