E-Mail IMAGE: In this single muscle fiber, a multitude of nuclei can be clearly seen. The researchers used DAPI for staining, it stains the DNA in the nuclei blue. view more Credit: C. Birchmeier Lab, MDC A muscle fiber consists of just one cell, but many nuclei. A team at the MDC led by Professor Carmen Birchmeier has now shown just how varied these nuclei are. The study, which has been published in Nature Communications, can help us better understand muscle diseases such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Usually, each cell has exactly one nucleus. But the cells of our skeletal muscles are different: These long, fibrous cells have a comparatively large cytoplasm that contains hundreds of nuclei. But up to now, we have known very little about the extent to which the nuclei of a single muscle fiber differ from each other in terms of their gene activity, and what effect this has on the function of the muscle.