Browsing by Author "Pihlajamäki, Lilli"

Folate has been shown to be important in muscle metabolism and in controlling nucleotide pools. As nucleotide pools are expected to decrease during differentiation while mtDNA increases, we studied whether folate availability controls increasing mtDNA amount. The aim of this study was to determine, how folate deficiency affects the differentiation of human myoblasts into myotubes and mitochondrial DNA copy number development. We cultured human and mouse myotubes in differentiation media with and without folate. Proper differentiation of the cells was determined by imaging and by studying key transcription factors. MtDNA copy number and gene expression of folate metabolism genes were measured using quantitative PCR. We concluded that the differentiation protocol was successful and that mtDNA copy number developed similarly in differentiating human and mouse myotubes. Further, clear differences were observed in folate metabolism gene expression patterns between the two cell types but not between cells cultured with and without folate.