Dystrophic Spinal Cord Transplants Induce Abnormal Thymidine Kinase Activity in Normal Muscles

Abstract

The role of the neural tube in the pathogenesis of muscular dystrophy was tested directly. Neural tubes from chicken embryos with hereditary muscular dystrophy and from genetically normal embryos were transplanted into normal recipient embryos. Dystrophic neural tissue induced in muscles of normal hosts high thymidine kinase activity characteristic of dystrophic muscle; normal neural tubes did not. We propose an early inductive effect of the neural tube on the presumptive myoblasts that sets their subsequent course of development, either normal or dystrophic.

The Neural Hypothesis of Muscular Dystrophy — A Review of Recent Experimental Evidence with particular reference to the Duchenne form

“…The experiments of Rathbone's group in the dystrophic chicken, however, suggest that the true situation is the reverse. These workers have been able to produce two of the biochemical features of dystrophy in breast musculature of control chickens by substituting neural tube segments from dystrophic embryos (Rathbone, Dimond and Vetrano, 1975;Rathbone, Stewart and Vickers, 1976). The experiments must be performed at 48-52 hours; manipulation of nerve-or muscle-forming tissue any later is ineffective, as judged by the negative results of limb-bud transplantation (Linkhart, Yee and Wilson, 1975).…”

Motoneuron Formation in the Brachial Spinal Cord of the Dystrophic Chick Embryo

“…Evidence from transplantation [23,24], cross-innervation [6] and embryonic behav ioral [20] studies suggests that the dystrophic gene is expressed in the nervous system early in development. A recent study has shown that early aspects of sarcomerogenesis in dys trophic muscle are abnormal [19].…”