Website: Michael Rudnicki's Lab
Department: Medicine, University of Ottawa
Research Interests:
Dr. Michael Rudnicki is a Senior Scientist and the Director of the Regenerative Medicine Program and the Sprott Centre for Stem Cell Research at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. He is Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Rudnicki is the Scientific Director of the Canadian Stem Cell Network.
Dr. Rudnicki received his Ph.D. at the University of Ottawa in 1988 with Dr. Michael McBurney where he examined the cardiac-specific control of gene expression during embryonal carcinoma cell differentiation. Dr. Rudnicki trained at the post-doctoral level at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Whitehead Institute with Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch. His post-doctoral studies involved the genetic dissection of the function of the MyoD-family of transcription factors by gene targeting. Dr. Rudnicki was appointed Assistant Professor at McMaster University in 1992. He moved to Ottawa In 2000 to join the Ottawa Health Research Institute.
Dr. Rudnicki is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he holds the Canada Research Chair in Molecular Genetics, and is an International Research Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Cell Biology and Cell Stem Cell, and has organized international research conferences as one of the founding directors of the Society for Muscle Biology. He holds operating grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Muscular Dystrophy Association, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Dr Rudnicki's laboratory works to understand the molecular mechanisms that regulate the determination, proliferation, and differentiation of stem cells during embryonic development and during tissue regeneration. The lab has conducted extensive studies into both embryonic myogenesis and the function of stem cells in adult regenerative myogenesis. Towards this end, the lab employs molecular genetic and genomic approaches to determine the function and roles played by regulatory factors. They identified Pax7 as a transcription factor required for the specification of satellite cells, and identified Wnt signaling as playing an important role in muscle stem cell function. His research has been published in scientific journals that include Cell, Nature Cell Biology, Cell Stem Cell, Genes & Development, and PLoS Biology.
Recent Stem Cell Publications:
Le Grand F, Jones AE, Seale V, Scimè A, Rudnicki MA. Wnt7a activates the planar cell polarity pathway to drive the symmetric expansion of satellite stem cells. Cell Stem Cell. 2009 Jun 5;4(6):535-47.
McKinnell IW, Ishibashi J, Le Grand F, Punch VG, Addicks GC, Greenblatt JF, Dilworth FJ, Rudnicki MA. Pax7 activates myogenic genes by recruitment of a histone methyltransferase complex. Nat Cell Biol. 2008 Jan;10(1):77-84. Epub 2007 Dec 9.
Kuang S, Kuroda K, Le Grand F, Rudnicki MA. Asymmetric self-renewal and commitment of satellite stem cells in muscle.Cell. 2007 Jun 1;129(5):999-1010.
