The muscle repair cell

Skeletal muscle stem cells

Muscle fibres are too large and too specialised to divide. Repair falls instead to satellite cells, a reserve population that waits, dormant, against the surface of every fibre.

Skeletal muscle stem cells: how it works A satellite cell activating, dividing, and fusing into a muscle fibre. Satellite cell 1
Activates on damage
2
Divides and commits
Fuses into the fibre
Structure accumulates in layers
A satellite cell activating, dividing, and fusing into a muscle fibre. Schematic. Not a photograph, and not a depiction of a RediCell process.

What it is

A skeletal muscle stem cell — usually called a satellite cell, from its position sitting against the outside of a muscle fibre under the surrounding membrane — is the cell that makes muscle repair possible.

In an undisturbed muscle they are quiescent: alive, but not dividing and not doing very much.

What it does in the body

A muscle fibre is a single very large cell containing many nuclei, formed when many precursor cells fused together. Because of that structure a fibre cannot simply divide to repair itself.

When a fibre is damaged or heavily loaded, satellite cells wake up. They divide, and the daughter cells take two different paths: some return to dormancy to keep the reserve stocked, and the rest commit, migrate to the damage and fuse — either into the existing fibre, donating their nuclei to it, or with each other to form a new fibre.

That donation of nuclei is the point. More nuclei in a fibre means more capacity to manufacture the contractile proteins the fibre is built from.

Where RediCell’s come from

Differentiated from umbilical cord tissue, at or below passage two.

What RediCell supplies from this line

Listed for reference only. Cell counts, particle counts and fill volumes are the specification; pricing is not published here and ordering is restricted to verified practitioners and institutions.

Preparations RediCell supplies from the Skeletal muscle stem cells line
CodePreparationSpecification
RC-MuSCs-10Skeletal Muscle Stem Cells10M cells / 2 ml vial
RC-MuSCs-25Skeletal Muscle Stem Cells25M cells / 5 ml vial
RC-EX-Mu1Muscle Exosome Matrix w/ growth factors110B+ exosomes / 1 ml vial

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