Myostatin is a novel negative regulator of skeletal muscle mass. Myostatin expression is also found in heart in a much less extent, but it can be upregulated in pathological conditions, such as heart failure. Myostatin may be involved in inhibiting protein synthesis and/or increasing protein degradation in skeletal and cardiac muscles. Herein, we used cell cultures and isolated muscles from rat...

AIM To estimate genetic variability in exon 3 of caprine myostatin gene in Marwari goats. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 120 blood samples from unrelated Marwari goats were randomly collected from different villages of Bikaner (Rajasthan), India. Genomic DNA was extracted from whole blood using blood DNA isolation kit (Himedia Ltd.) as per manufacturer's protocol. The quality of extracted g...

Recent studies suggest that inhibiting the protein myostatin, a negative regulator of skeletal muscle mass, may improve outcomes in patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy by enhancing muscle mass. When the dystrophin-deficient golden retriever muscular dystrophy (GRMD) dog was bred with whippets having a heterozygous mutation for the myostatin gene, affected GRMD dogs with decreased myostati...

Calcineurin is a heterodimeric Ca2+/calmodulin dependent protein phosphatase that has been implicated in the regulation of skeletal muscle hypertrophy in mammals (Dunn et al., 1999; Musaro et al., 1999; Semsarian et al., 1999). Calcineurin is widely expressed in eukaryotes and highly conserved (reviewed by Guerini, 1997; Sugiura et al., 2001). Prolonged increases in intracellular Ca2+ levels se...

Myostatin is a member of the transforming growth factor beta (TGF-beta) superfamily that functions as a negative regulator of skeletal muscle development and growth. Myostatin blockade therefore offers a strategy for promoting muscle growth in livestock production without resorting to genetic manipulation. In this report, we examined the effect of myostatin inhibition by plasmid-mediated delive...

Myostatin, a negative regulator of muscle mass, is elevated during disuse and starvation. Mammalian hibernation presents a unique scenario, where animals are hypocaloric and in torpor, but the extent of muscle protein loss is minimized. We hypothesized that myostatin expression, which is usually increased early in disuse and under hypocaloric conditions, could be suppressed in this unique model...

Myostatin is a potent inhibitor of myogenesis; thus differential expression might be expected across individuals varying in responsiveness to myogenic stimuli. We hypothesized that myostatin would be differentially regulated across humans with markedly different hypertrophic responses to resistance training (RT; 16 wk). Targets were assessed in muscle biopsies at baseline (T1) and 24 h after th...

Myostatin, a member of the transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) superfamily, is expressed in developing and adult skeletal muscle and negatively regulates skeletal muscle growth. Recently, myostatin has been found to be expressed in tendons and increases tendon fibroblast proliferation and the expression of tenocyte markers. C2C12 is a mouse myoblast cell line, which has the ability to transdif...

Myostatin, a transforming growth factor beta (TGF-beta) family member, is a potent negative regulator of skeletal muscle growth. In this study we characterized the myostatin signal transduction pathway and examined its effect on bone morphogenetic protein (BMP)-induced adipogenesis. While both BMP7 and BMP2 activated transcription from the BMP-responsive I-BRE-Lux reporter and induced adipogeni...

Myostatin, a member of the TGF-β superfamily of secreted proteins, is expressed primarily in skeletal muscle. It negatively regulates muscle mass and is associated with glucocorticoid-induced muscle atrophy. However, it remains unclear whether myostatin is involved in glucocorticoid-induced muscle protein turnover. The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of myostatin in protein...