Role of myostatin in skeletal muscle growth and cevelopment: implications for sarcopenia

Other Publication ResearchOnline@JCU
McFarlane, Craig;Sharma, Mridula;Kambadur, Ravi
Abstract

Myostatin is a secreted growth and differentiating factor that belongs to TGF-bsuper-family. Myostatin is expressed in skeletal muscle predominantly. Low levels of myostatin expression are seen in heart, adipose tissue and mammary gland. Naturally occurring mutations in bovine, ovine, canine and human myostatingene or inactivation of the murine myostatingene lead to an increase in muscle mass due to hyperplasia. Molecularly, myostatin has been shown to regulate muscle growth not only by controlling myoblast proliferation and differentiation during fetal myogenesis, but also by regulating satellite cell activation and self-renewal postnatally. Consistent with the molecular genetic studies, injection of several myostatin blockers including Follistatin, myostatin antibodies and the Prodomain of myostatin have all been independently shown to increase muscle regeneration and growth in muscular dystrophy mouse models of muscle wasting. Furthermore, prolonged absence of myostatinin mice has also been shown to reduce sarcopenic muscle loss, due to efficient satellite cell activation and regeneration of skeletal muscle in aged mice. Similarly, treatment of aged mice with Mstn-ant 1 also increased satellite cell activation and enhanced the efficiency of muscles to regen-erate. Given that antagonism of myostatin leads to significant increase in postnatal muscle growth, we propose that myostatin antagonists have tremendous therapeutic value in alleviating sarcopenic muscle loss.

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Sarcopenia - Age-Related Muscle Wasting and Weakness: mechanisms and treatments

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ISBN/ISSN

978-90-481-9712-5

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Pages Count

29

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Publisher

Springer

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Publisher Location

London, UK

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DOI

10.1007/978-90-481-9713-2_18