Abstract
Tissue Regeneration For many athletes, an injury to a tendon (the tissue that connects muscle to bone) can be career ending. The regenerative capacity of tendons is limited; even after surgical repair, tendons often do not regain their original mechanical strength because of scar tissue formation. The mechanisms involved in the response to tendon injury are poorly understood. Studying the patellar tendon in mice, Harvey et al. found that tendon stem cells and scar tissue progenitor cells reside within the same microenvironmental niche and that the activity of both cell types is stimulated by platelet-derived growth factor receptor α. The shared response to this signaling pathway explains why fibrosis accompanies tendon healing and suggests that therapeutically disentangling the two responses may be difficult. Nat. Cell Biol. 12 , 1490 (2019).
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