Post-transcriptional control of gene expression

One surprising phenomenon is that quiescent stem cells express a multitude of different transcript isoforms for any given gene, and these isoforms can have different functions and are differentially regulated. For example, we found that muscle stem cells express short and long isoforms of Pax3 mRNA, but only the long isoforms are repressed by microRNAs. A key interest of the lab is to understand how quiescent stem cell work with different transcript isoforms. How do quiescent stem cells generate different mRNA isoforms, how do these isoforms affect stem cell function, and how do the cells regulate these different isoforms?