A scalable, clinically severe pig model for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

Large-animal models for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) are crucial for the evaluation of diagnostic procedures and treatment strategies. Pigs cloned from male cells lacking DMD exon 52 (DMDΔ52) exhibit molecular, clinical and pathological hallmarks of DMD, but die before sexual maturity and cannot be propagated by breeding. Therefore, we generated female DMD+/- carriers.

A new method for physical disector analyses of numbers and mean volumes of immunohistochemically labeled cells in paraffin sections.

Background: In the neurosciences, the physical disector method represents an established quantitative stereological method for unbiased sampling and counting of cells in histological tissue sections of known thickness. Physical disector analyses are conventionally performed using plastic-embedded tissue samples, because plastic-embedding causes a comparably low and definable shrinkage of the embedded tissue, and the thickness of thin plastic sections can be determined adequately. However, immunohistochemistry protocols often don't work satisfactorily in sections of plastic-embedded tissue.

Detection of collagens by multispectral optoacoustic tomography as an imaging biomarker for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

Biomarkers for monitoring of disease progression and response to therapy are lacking for muscle diseases such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Noninvasive in vivo molecular imaging with multispectral optoacoustic tomography (MSOT) uses pulsed laser light to induce acoustic pressure waves, enabling the visualization of endogenous chromophores. Here we describe an application of MSOT, in which illumination in the near- and extended near-infrared ranges from 680-1,100 nm enables the visualization and quantification of collagen content.