Abstract
Recent microarray and RNAseq experiments provided evidence that glial derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) levels were decreased in extraocular muscles from human strabismic subjects compared to age-matched controls. We assessed the effect of sustained GDNF treatment of the superior rectus muscles of rabbits on their physiological and morphological characteristics, and these were compared to naïve control muscles. Superior rectus muscles of rabbits were implanted with a sustained release pellet of GDNF to deliver 2μg/day, with the contralateral side receiving a placebo pellet. After one month, the muscles were assessed using in vitro physiological methods. The muscles were examined histologically for alteration in fiber size, myosin expression patterns, neuromuscular junction size, and stem cell numbers and compared to age-matched naïve control muscles. GDNF resulted in decreased force generation, which was also seen on the untreated contralateral superior rectus muscles. Muscle relaxation times were increased in the GDNF treated muscles. Myo-fiber mean cross-sectional areas were increased after the GDNF treatment, but there was a compensatory increase in expression of developmental, neonatal, and slow tonic myosin heavy chain isoforms. In addition, in the GDNF treated muscles there was a large increase in Pitx2-positive myogenic precursor cells. One month of GDNF resulted in significant extraocular muscle adaptation. These changes are interesting relative to the decreased levels of GDNF in the muscles from subjects with strabismus and preliminary data in infant nonhuman primates where sustained GDNF treatment produced a strabismus. These data support the view that GDNF has the potential for improving eye alignment in subjects with strabismus.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0202861 |
| Journal | PloS one |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was funded by NIH R01EY15313 (LKM) and NIH P30 EY11375 from the National Eye Institute, the Minnesota Lions Foundation, and an unrestricted grant to the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Neurosciences from Research to Prevent Blindness, Inc. The funder did not play any role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Fitzpatrick et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.