We have an experiment that will look at the impacts of treatment on the proliferation of total muscle fibre (i.e. combining primary, secondary and tertiary) in the skeletal muscle of pigs. Technically, the total muscle fibre number count is usually conducted using muscle tissue section staining (eg, nuclei stain or specific antibody), which requires either biopsy or euthanasia of the experimental animals. To avoid this invasive sampling procedure and to achieve better animal welfare, are there any circulating biomarkers (with/without challenge) that can be used as an estimation of total muscle number (e.g., the circulating biomarker is correlated with the total number of skeletal myofibre)?
Thank you
Kind Regards,
Fan
Hi Fan,
Assuming that you collect samples at birth or early neonatal stage. There is evidence that animal muscle fiber numbers and myogenesis rates are positively associated with fetal circulating insulin and IGF-1 concentrations near term, and negatively associated with circulating norepinephrine and cortisol. Those correlations also apply to hindlimb mass.
See two papers
J Endocrinol. doi:10.1530/JOE-19-0273.
J Physiol. doi: 10.1113/JP275230
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