1997 Volume 20 Issue 2 Pages 134-137
In BIO14.6 cardiomyopathic hamster heart, the dystrophin-glycoprotein complex is disrupted and sarcoglycans are greatly reduced in abundance. We examined whether the gene expression of β- and γ-sarcoglycans is indeed defective in this hamster. We found that mRNA expression for these proteins and the cDNA sequences of their coding regions are identical in both normal and myopathic hamster cardiomyocytes. The results strongly suggest that defect in a currently unknown sarcoglycan-associated protein(s) is responsible for the deficiency of the sarcoglycan complex that leads to muscle cell necrosis in the myopathic hamster.