Cell culture models in developing nutrigenomics foods for inflammatory bowel disease.

Nutrigenomics seeks to understand the interplay between an individual's genes and their diet. This approach can potentially be harnessed to reduce the incidence or symptoms of chronic diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). It becomes desirable to interrogate the vast number of discrete compounds present in foods for their ability to influence the phenotype of a cell carrying a variant single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP).

Myostatin auto-regulates its expression by feedback loop through Smad7 dependent mechanism.

Myostatin, a secreted growth factor, is a member of the TGF-beta superfamily and an inhibitor of myogenesis. Previously, we have shown that myostatin gene expression is regulated at the level of transcription and that myostatin is a downstream target gene of MyoD. Here we show that myostatin gene expression is auto-regulated by a negative feedback mechanism.

Molecular analysis of fiber type-specific expression of murine myostatin promoter.

Myostatin is a negative regulator of muscle growth, and absence of the functional myostatin protein leads to the heavy muscle phenotype in both mouse and cattle. Although the role of myostatin in controlling muscle mass is established, little is known of the mechanisms regulating the expression of the myostatin gene. In this study, we have characterized the murine myostatin promoter in vivo.