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Abstract: While the function of adult tissue-resident stem cells during regeneration and disease have received much attention, the mechanistic basis of stem cell driven organ growth remains relatively poorly defined. Consequently, our understanding of processes that drive organ development remains piecemeal. Understanding stem cell dynamics within the organ systems that deploy them to generate growth is critical for the success of ongoing efforts to generate complex functioning organs from organoid rudiments in vitro. Thus, we have sought to understand the stem cell processes that regulate and drive myotomal growth from the template of the embryonic myotome using zebrafish as our main model system. Here we compare and contrast modes of myotomal growth and muscle regeneration and their molecular regulation in distinct niches across the phylogeny, in attempt to generate a fuller understanding of the way muscle stem cells act within different vertebrate clades.

Biography: Professor Peter Currie is a world-renowned developmental evolutionary and stem cell biologist who studies the genetic basis of skeletal muscle stem cell action during development, evolution, regeneration and disease. His key discoveries utilise several models, chiefly the zebrafish, to define the genetic and evolutionary basis for muscle formation and growth throughout vertebrate phylogeny. Prof Currie has played a key role globally in developing zebrafish as a disease model for human muscle disease and regeneration biology. He has also been instrumental in establishing shark embryology as a modern evolutionary paradigm to understand the evolutionary origins of the vertebrate body plan.

In 2016, Professor Peter Currie was appointed Director of Research of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is a recipient of a European Molecular Biology Organization Young Investigators Award and a Wellcome Trust International Research Fellowship and currently is a Principal Research Fellow with the National Health and Medical Research Council in Australia and an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.