Effect of Maternal Passive Autoimmunization against Myostatin on Growth Performance in Chickens

Myostatin is a negative regulator of skeletal muscle growth and a loss of functional myostatin protein increases muscle hypertrophy and hyperplasia in cattle. The present study was conducted to investigate whether maternal passive immunization against myostatin would improve growth performance in chickens. A complete broiler myostatin cDNA was cloned and it was expressed into two transcripts as 1,128 bp and 985 bp by alternative splicing. A conjugated mature myostatin (350 bp) was used to induce autoimmunization and maternal passively immunized chickens was used for the experiment. It was confirmed that there was a maternal passive immunization against myostatin at zero weeks of age, but its effect was reduced by 6 weeks of age. The auto-immunized groups showed smaller body weights than those of control group during the growing period and the difference was getting bigger with time until 6 weeks of age. These results suggest that passive autoimmunization against myostatin used in this study is not potent enough to stimulate growth performance in chickens. (Asian-Aust. J. Anim. Sci. 2005. Vol 18, No. 7 : 1017-1021)