This paper would not have been possible without the outstanding perseverance and creativity of first author Ji-Hyung Lee, and we couldn’t be prouder of what he accomplished. Also sincerely grateful to our incredible collaborators-Jeff Dilworth, Kiran Nakka, Roger Greenberg, Patrick Seale!
We discovered a previously unrecognized role for TRF2 in preserving muscle stem cell identity and enabling muscle regeneration-a finding that changes how we think about this classic telomere protein and opens new directions for understanding muscle’s remarkable regeneration capability.