(Press-News.org) Baltimore, MD — The study of muscular system protein myostatin has been of great interest to researchers as a potential therapeutic target for people with muscular disorders. Although much is known about how myostatin affects muscle growth, there has been disagreement about what types of muscle cells it acts upon. New research from a team including Carnegie's Chen-Ming Fan and Christoph Lepper narrows down the field to one likely type of cell. Their work is published the week of August 6 by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Myostatin is known to inhibit muscle growth and its function is common in many mammals, including cows, sheep, dogs, humans, and mice. Mutant mice lacking in myostatin have muscle mass that is almost double that of normal mice. This property is what makes it an attractive potential drug target. By inhibiting myostatin a drug could, in theory, promote muscle growth, even in a person with a muscular disease.
There has been considerable debate about which types of muscle cells are targeted by myostatin: fibrous muscle cells called myofibers, or muscle stem cells called satellite cells. The satellite cells are activated by muscular injury, begin to divide, and fuse to myofibers. Some studies seem to indicate myostatin targets satellite cells, others indicate myofibers.
The research team, co-led by Fan and Se-Jin Lee, who is a former Carnegie Staff Associate and currently at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, used a variety of techniques—both genetic and pharmacological—and determined that the muscle growth caused by inhibiting myostatin does not significantly involve the incorporation of satellite cells into myofibers.
This finding has major implications for the possible use of myostatin as a clinical target. There are outstanding questions about how a drug designed to target myostatin would work in clinical conditions in which patient's satellite cells are depleted. For example, in diseases like muscular dystrophy, satellite cells are believed to compensate for degenerated muscle cells in the early stages of the disease, causing the pool of these stem cells to shrink over time. This work raises the possibility that these patients might still benefit from myostatin inhibitors.
"More work is needed to determine whether these findings are applicable to various clinical conditions, such as exercise, injury, and sarcopenia—degenerative loss of muscle mass associated with aging," Fan said. "However, our findings initially indicate that many different diseases affecting the muscular system could potentially be responsive to drugs that inhibit myostatin and thus promote muscle growth, without regard to the status of the muscle stem cell pool."
###
The other co-authors on the study are Than Huynh, Yun-Sil Lee, and Suzanne Sebald of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Sarah Wilcox-Adelman of the Boston Biomedical Research Institute; Naoki Iwamori and Martin Matzuk of Baylor College of Medicine
Under a licensing agreement between Pfizer Inc. and the Johns Hopkins University, Se-Jin Lee is entitled to a share of royalty received by the University on sales of products related to myostatin. The terms of this arrangement are being managed by the university, in accordance with its conflict of interest policies.
This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
The Carnegie Institution for Science (carnegiescience.edu) is a private, nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with six research departments throughout the U.S. Since its founding in 1902, the Carnegie Institution has been a pioneering force in basic scientific research. Carnegie scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy, materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science.
ITHACA, N.Y. – A colorful, fruit-eating bird with a black mask, pale belly and scarlet breast – never before described by science – has been discovered and named by Cornell University graduates following an expedition to the remote Peruvian Andes.
The Sira Barbet, Capito fitzpatricki, is described in a paper published in the July 2012 issue of The Auk, the official publication of the American Ornithologists' Union.
The new species was discovered during a 2008 expedition led by Michael G. Harvey, Glenn Seeholzer and Ben Winger, young ornithologists who had recently graduated ...
Using just an upgraded desktop computer equipped with a relatively inexpensive graphics processing card, a team of computer scientists and biochemists at the University of California, San Diego, has developed advanced GPU accelerated software and demonstrated for the first time that this approach can sample biological events that occur on the millisecond timescale.
These results have the potential to bring millisecond scale sampling, now available only on a multi-million dollar supercomputer, to all researchers, and could significantly impact the study of protein dynamics ...
MINNEAPOLIS (August 6, 2012) – University of Minnesota School of Public Health researchers have found that medical group practices can reduce costs for patients with diabetes by investing in improved quality of care.
In the study, which appears in the August issue of Health Affairs, University of Minnesota researchers analyzed 234 medical group practices providing care for more than 133,000 diabetic patients. After developing a "quality of care" score based on select patient care initiatives, researchers found that medical providers saved an average of $51 in health ...
In a large epidemiologic study, researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Cancer Center found that the children of U.S.-born Latina women are at higher risk of having retinoblastoma, a malignant tumor of the retina which typically occurs in children under six.
The study, which focused on babies born in California, also found that offspring of older fathers were at greater risk for retinoblastoma, as were children born to women with sexually transmitted diseases and those born in multiple births, which may indicate an increased risk from in vitro fertilization. Those findings confirmed ...
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Most people think of seafood as either wild or farmed, but in fact both categories may apply to the fish you pick up from your grocery store. In recent years, for example, as much as 40 percent of the Alaskan salmon catch originated in fish hatcheries, although it may be labeled "all wild, never farmed."
An article produced by a working group of UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) recommends that when a combination of seafood production techniques are used, this be acknowledged in the marketplace. ...
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Young children who are able to pay attention and persist on a task have a 50 percent greater chance of completing college, according to a new study at Oregon State University.
Tracking a group of 430 preschool-age children, the study gives compelling evidence that social and behavioral skills, such as paying attention, following directions and completing a task may be even more crucial than academic abilities.
And the good news for parents and educators, the researchers said, is that attention and persistence skills are malleable and can be taught.
The ...
Despite a twenty-five year old law that bans "patient dumping" the practice continues to put uninsured Americans at risk, according to a national team of researchers led by a professor at the George Washington School of Public Health and Health Services. Patient dumping is the practice of turning away or transferring uninsured patients with emergency medical conditions.
The study, which appears in the August issue of Health Affairs, suggests that hospitals still practice "patient dumping" which is in violation of the law. The researchers investigate and present five ...
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A study from University of Illinois economics professors demonstrates a new method to analyze the relationships among voters' issue preferences, the candidates' policy positions and voter behavior.
Estimating the distribution of voter preferences and the extent of policy divergence between the candidates' platforms, economics professors Stefan Krasa and Mattias Polborn are able to separate observed changes in voter behavior into those driven by voter radicalization versus those caused by increased policy differences between the two parties.
"We have ...
Health coverage for the poorest Americans could be in jeopardy in many states as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling last month on the Affordable Care Act, according to a new legal analysis. The report examines federal and state Medicaid options following the United States Supreme Court's ruling in NFIB v Sebelius and appears in the August issue of the journal Health Affairs.
"Some states will use the court's decision as an excuse to delay or refuse to participate in the expansion of Medicaid as outlined in the Affordable Care Act," says lead author of the report, ...
URBANA – The trade in ivory was largely outlawed in 1989, but poaching continues and remains a serious threat to the African elephant. Seizures of large amounts of ivory, sometimes over a ton, continue to occur. Research by Alfred Roca, an assistant professor at the university, could be the basis for the development of new law enforcement tools.
Roca has found a way to determine where the ivory comes from. With funding from the Division of International Conservation of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he and his collaborators have sampled elephants at 22 locations ...
