I have a student who is comparing exercising rats (that had voluntary access to running wheels for 8 weeks), sedentary rats (that were in wheel-free cages for 8 weeks), and de-trained rats (that had running wheels for 4 weeks and then were sedentary for 4 weeks). She will be doing qPCR on the soleus muscle for VEGFA, FGF2, and MUSTN1; and the housekeeping gene they are considering is ACTB. She would like to use more than one reference gene to increase the validity of the assay so I said I'd ask the Research Gate community to see if anyone has any other suggestions.
ActB is pretty terrible in muscle, in my experience (though caveat: I work with mouse muscle).
For mouse muscle I generally use Pak1ip1, Ap3d1 and GAPDH (from the primerdesign genorm-plus kit), but 18S is also not too bad.
I would recommend you use at least two reference genes (ideally three) and if you have the time & money, I'd suggest you test a panel of 6-10 candidate genes (against a subset of samples from your test and control groups) then run the numbers through geNorm, normfinder or bestkeeper to identify suitable genes.
As a researcher on mouse skeletal muscle, I would suggest 18S rDNA.
18S rDNA was also used in this paper about exercise in rat skeletal muscle:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3229281/
Just take care that the ACTB expression don't change after exercise. I already saw papers about atrophy of rat skeletal muscle in witch the actin expression changed.
ActB is pretty terrible in muscle, in my experience (though caveat: I work with mouse muscle).
For mouse muscle I generally use Pak1ip1, Ap3d1 and GAPDH (from the primerdesign genorm-plus kit), but 18S is also not too bad.
I would recommend you use at least two reference genes (ideally three) and if you have the time & money, I'd suggest you test a panel of 6-10 candidate genes (against a subset of samples from your test and control groups) then run the numbers through geNorm, normfinder or bestkeeper to identify suitable genes.
An interesting link:
http://blog.biosearchtech.com/TheBiosearchTechBlog/bid/27718/The-New-Favorite-Reference-Gene-36B4-a-k-a-RPLP0
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