“…Thigh muscle was removed, weighed and frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored at -20 °C for later measurement of DNA, RNA and protein content (Wannemacher et al, 1965;Munro and Fleck, 1966;Abraham et al, 1972 Ashton and Francis, 1978;Weidman and Bala, 1980) and the ability of tissues such as chick liver cells (Haselbacher et al, 1980) and chick cartilage (Burch et al, 1986), to synthesize IGF-I (d'Ercole et al, 1976), it is widely believed that IGF-11 may be the somatomedin involved in growth promotion in the fetus (Moses et al, 1980). IGF-I blood levels are low in fetal life compared to postnatal values (Gluckman et al, 1983;Spencer GSG et al, 1983); in contrast, IGF-11 levels were found to be high in the fetus of some species (Moses et al, 1980).…”