Identification and Validation of Quantitative PCR Reference Genes Suitable for Normalizing Expression in Normal and Dystrophic Cell Culture Models of Myogenesis

The coordinated differentiation of myoblasts to mature muscle is essential for muscle development and repair, and study of the myogenic program in health and disease is critical to the understanding and treatment of muscle pathologies. Use of quantitative RT-PCR to analyse gene expression in cell culture models of muscle differentiation can be highly informative, but data must be normalized to one or more suitable reference genes. Myogenesis is highly dynamic, thus identification of genes with stable expression throughout this process is challenging. Establishing a common set of reference genes suitable for measuring expression in both healthy and disease models would be of considerable advantage. We measured expression of 11 candidate normalization genes (Cdc40, Htatsf1, Ap3d1, Csnk2a2, Fbxw2, Fbxo38, Pak1ip1, Zfp91, GAPDH, ActB, 18S) in three cell culture models of myogenesis (C2C12 , H2K2B4, and the dystrophic line H2KSF1). Strong and weak normalization candidates were identified using the software packages Bestkeeper, geNorm and Normfinder, then validated against several known myogenic markers (MyoD, myogenin, MEF2C, dystrophin). Our data show that Csnk2a2 and Ap3d1 are suitable for normalizing gene expression during differentiation in both healthy and dystrophic cell-culture models, and that the commonly-used reference standards 18S, ActB and GAPDH are exceptionally poor candidates.