Loss of muscle and bone mass with age are significant contributors to falls and fractures among the elderly. Myostatin deficiency is associated with increased muscle mass in mice, dogs, cows, sheep and humans, and mice lacking myostatin have been observed to show increased bone density in the limb, spine, and jaw. Transgenic overexpression of myostatin propeptide, which binds to and inhibits th...

Dasarathy S, Muc S, Runkana A, Mullen KD, Kaminsky-Russ K, McCullough AJ. Alteration in body composition in the portacaval anastamosis rat is mediated by increased expression of myostatin. Am J Physiol Gastrointest Liver Physiol 301: G731–G738, 2011. First published July 28, 2011; doi:10.1152/ajpgi.00161.2011.—The portacaval anastamosis (PCA) rat is a model to examine nutritional consequences o...

Myostatin inhibits myoblast proliferation and differentiation in developing muscle. Mounting evidence suggests that myostatin also plays a limiting role in growth/repair/regeneration of differentiated adult muscle by inhibiting satellite cell activation. We tested the hypothesis that myostatin mRNA expression would decrease after resistance loading (RL) with a blunted response in older (O) fema...

Myostatin, a negative regulator of skeletal muscle growth, is produced from myostatin precursor by multiple steps of proteolytic processing. After cleavage by a furin-type protease, the propeptide and growth factor domains remain associated, forming a noncovalent complex, the latent myostatin complex. Mature myostatin is liberated from latent myostatin by bone morphogenetic protein 1/tolloid pr...

BACKGROUND Yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a widely-used system for protein expression. We previously showed that heat-killed whole recombinant yeast vaccine expressing mammalian myostatin can modulate myostatin function in mice, resulting in increase of body weight and muscle composition in these animals. Foreign DNA introduced into yeast cells can be lost soon unless cells are continuously ...

Myostatin or growth and differentiation factor 8 (GDF8), has been known as the factor causing double muscling phenotypes in which a series of mutations make the myostatin protein inactive, hence disabling it to regulate the deposition of muscle fibre. This phenotype happens with high frequency in a breed of sheep known as the Texel. Quantitative trait loci (QTL) studies show that a portion of t...

Satellite cells are quiescent muscle stem cells that promote postnatal muscle growth and repair. Here we show that myostatin, a TGF-beta member, signals satellite cell quiescence and also negatively regulates satellite cell self-renewal. BrdU labeling in vivo revealed that, among the Myostatin-deficient satellite cells, higher numbers of satellite cells are activated as compared with wild type....

A simple PCR-based allele detection system has been developed to assist in the management of the two most prevalent double-muscled (mh) breeds in the U.S. Application of this assay will permit the implementation of structured mating systems dependent on precise genotypes at the mh locus. The genetic assay uses standard fluorescent genotyping technology and relies on the unique nucleotide compos...

Myostatin is a potent negative regulator of skeletal muscle growth. Although several cDNA clones have been characterized in different vertebrates, the genomic organization and bioactivity of non-mammalian homologs have not. The intron/exon organization and promoter subsequence analysis of two rainbow trout myostatin genes, rtMSTN-1a and rtMSTN-1b (formerly 1 and 2 respectively), as well as a qu...