Sartorelli explains metabolic and epigenetic control of muscle stem cell ageing in CSHL interview

In a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory interview series for its Leading Strand channel, researcher Sartorelli explains how ageing impairs muscle stem cells, or satellite cells, which maintain muscle homeostasis and repair damage throughout life. She attributes their declining repair capacity to both cell-intrinsic mechanisms and external microenvironmental factors, including global rises in the repressive H3K27 trimethylation mark and NF-κB demethylation that drives an inflammation programme. Supplementing α-ketoglutarate and glutamine improved proliferation and muscle repair in aged stem cells, and tools such as dCas9 can recruit demethylases or methyltransferases to tune epigenetic marks at specific loci.