The genetic defects responsible for the allelic disorders of BMD and the more severe DMD have been shown to be mutations within the dystrophin gene, which encodes a 14 kb transcript. We describe here a BMD patient who belongs to a small class of subjects with large in frame deletions of the dystrophin gene that remove apparently dispensable coding sequence, thereby producing functional truncate...

transcription factors that sense physiological and environmental states regulate aging processes. Lifespan extension was achieved by the modulation of these pathways in yeast, worms, flies and mice. Remarkably, slowing aging processes resulted in the amelioration of age-dependent degenerative diseases (reviewed by shows that lifespan-extending signaling pathways may provide opportunities for th...

Manipulation of dystrophin pre-mRNA processing offers the potential to overcome mutations in the dystrophin gene that would otherwise lead to Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Dystrophin mutations will require the removal of one or more exons to restore the reading frame and in some cases, multiple exon skipping strategies exist to restore dystrophin expression. However, for some small intra-exonic ...

Mutations in the human dystrophin gene cause the Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophies. The Dystrophin protein provides a structural link between the muscle cytoskeleton and extracellular matrix to maintain muscle integrity. Recently, Dystrophin has also been found to act as a scaffold for several signaling molecules, but the roles of dystrophin-mediated signaling pathways remain unknown. To...

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) and Becker muscular dystrophy (BMD) are X-linked recessive disorders caused by mutations of the DMD gene located at Xp21. In DMD patients, dystrophin is virtually absent; whereas BMD patients have 10% to 40% of the normal amount. Deletions in the dystrophin gene represent 65% of mutations in DMD/BMD patients. To explain the contribution of immunohistochemical a...

-We present two cases of autosomal dominant limb girdle muscular dystrophy in a father and son. Both presented in childhood with a classical Becker muscular dystrophy phenotype. The father had initially been informed that he would not have affected children. After the diagnosis of muscular dystrophy in the son, immunoblot analysis was performed on muscle and revealed normal dystrophin. The poly...

Gene replacement therapies utilizing adeno-associated viral (AAV) vectors hold great promise for treating Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). A related approach uses AAV vectors to edit specific regions of the DMD gene using CRISPR/Cas9. Here we develop multiple approaches for editing the mutation in dystrophic mdx4cv mice using single and dual AAV vector delivery of a muscle-specific Cas9 casse...

Introduction The integrity of the animal cell membrane is believed to be maintained in part by the large (approx. 400 kDa) cytoskeletal proteins dystrophin and utrophin. Both proteins are capable of forming a link, probably flexible and potentially extensible/compressible, between the actin cytoskeleton and the cell membrane itself. Utrophin is expressed in all cell types, whereas dystrophin ex...

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a progressive muscle weakness characterized by a lack of dystrophin expression in the sarcolemma of muscle fibers. Both myoblast transplantation and gene therapy based on direct and ex vivo gene transfer techniques have been investigated as ways to deliver dystrophin in dystrophic muscle. Although the myoblast-mediated ex vivo gene transfer approach has been found...