Background. Mammalian hibernation in thirteen-lined ground squirrels (Ictidomys tridecemlineatus) is characterized by dramatic changes on a physiological and molecular level. During hibernation, mammalian hearts show a propensity to hypertrophy due to the need for increasing contractility to pump colder and more viscous blood. While cardiac hypertrophy is quite often a process characterized by ...

The basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) transcription factor Myod directly regulates gene expression throughout the program of skeletal muscle differentiation. It is not known how a Myod-driven myogenic program is modulated to achieve muscle fiber-type-specific gene expression. Pbx homeodomain proteins mark promoters of a subset of Myod target genes, including myogenin (Myog); thus, Pbx proteins migh...

Abnormal differentiation of muscle is closely associated with aging (sarcopenia) and diseases such as cancer and type II diabetes. Thus, understanding the mechanisms that regulate muscle differentiation will be useful in the treatment and prevention of these conditions. Protein lysine acetylation and methylation are major post-translational modification mechanisms that regulate key cellular pro...

Mustn1 (Mustang, musculoskeletal temporally activated novel gene) was originally identified in fracture callus tissue, but its greatest expression is detected in skeletal muscle. Thus, we conducted experiments to investigate the expression and function of Mustn1 during myogenesis. Temporally, quantitative real-time PCR analysis of muscle samples from embryonic day 17 to 12 mo of age reveals tha...

Wdr68 is a highly conserved scaffolding protein required for craniofacial development and left-right asymmetry. A Ras-Map3k-Wdr68-Dyrk1 signaling relay may mediate these and other diverse signaling events important in development and disease. While the sub-cellular localization of Wdr68 has been shown to be dependent on that of its interaction partners, it is not clear where Wdr68 activity is r...

Uterine crowding in the pig results in intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR), and permanently affects fetal muscle fibre development, representing production losses for the commercial pig herd. The present study sought to understand how different levels of uterine crowding in sows affects muscle fibre development in the early embryo at the time of muscle fibre differentiation and proliferation...

N-Myc downstream-regulated gene 4 (NDRG4) plays an important role in biological processes and pathogenesis, but its function in muscle development is unclear. In this study, we investigated the function of the NDRG4 gene in the regulation of myogenic differentiation. NDRG4 expression is upregulated during muscle regeneration and C2C12 myoblast differentiation. Gain and loss of function studies ...

Voltage-gated calcium channel (Cav) β subunits are auxiliary subunits to Cavs. Recent reports show Cavβ subunits may enter the nucleus and suggest a role in transcriptional regulation, but the physiological relevance of this localization remains unclear. We sought to define the nuclear function of Cavβ in muscle progenitor cells (MPCs). We found that Cavβ1a is expressed in proliferating MPCs, b...

Organogenesis is a conventional research area in developmental biology. Recent research progresses on stem cell, epigenetics, no-coding RNA and other new properties of multicellular organisms have transformed the organogenesis research as a frontier of life science. The collection of six research papers in this issue aims to cover timely developments in the research area of organogenesis from b...

1Journal paper no. J-17200 of the Iowa Agric. and Home Econ. Exp. Sta., Ames. Project no. 3184. The authors express their appreciation to R. Larson, J. Helm, and J. Newton for DNA collection and isolation. Contribution of PiGMaP DNA by PiGMaP laboratories is appreciated. This work was supported in part by the EC Bridge “PiGMaP” program and the Iowa Agric. and Home Econ. Exp. Sta., Ames. 2Presen...