A sensitive, reproducible and objective immunofluorescence analysis method of dystrophin in individual fibers in samples from patients with duchenne muscular dystrophy

PLoS One. 2014 Sep 22;9(9):e107494. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0107494. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is characterized by the absence or reduced levels of dystrophin expression on the inner surface of the sarcolemmal membrane of muscle fibers. Clinical development of therapeutic approaches aiming to increase dystrophin levels requires sensitive and reproducible measurement of differences in dystrophin expression in muscle biopsies of treated patients with DMD. This, however, poses a technical challenge due to intra- and inter-donor variance in the occurrence of revertant fibers and low trace dystrophin expression throughout the biopsies. We have developed an immunofluorescence and semi-automated image analysis method that measures the sarcolemmal dystrophin intensity per individual fiber for the entire fiber population in a muscle biopsy. Cross-sections of muscle co-stained for dystrophin and spectrin have been imaged by confocal microscopy, and image analysis was performed using Definiens software. Dystrophin intensity has been measured in the sarcolemmal mask of spectrin for each individual muscle fiber and multiple membrane intensity parameters (mean, maximum, quantiles per fiber) were calculated. A histogram can depict the distribution of dystrophin intensities for the fiber population in the biopsy. This method was tested by measuring dystrophin in DMD, Becker muscular dystrophy, and healthy muscle samples. Analysis of duplicate or quadruplicate sections of DMD biopsies on the same or multiple days, by different operators, or using different antibodies, was shown to be objective and reproducible (inter-assay precision, CV 2-17% and intra-assay precision, CV 2-10%). Moreover, the method was sufficiently sensitive to detect consistently small differences in dystrophin between two biopsies from a patient with DMD before and after treatment with an investigational compound.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Biopsy
  • Dystrophin / metabolism*
  • Fluorescent Antibody Technique / methods*
  • Humans
  • Muscle Fibers, Skeletal / metabolism*
  • Muscle Fibers, Skeletal / pathology
  • Muscular Dystrophy, Duchenne / metabolism*
  • Muscular Dystrophy, Duchenne / pathology
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Sensitivity and Specificity

Substances

  • Dystrophin

Grants and funding

Funding provided by Prosensa Therapeutics BV, Leiden, the Netherlands. The funder provided support in the form of salaries, equipment and facilities for all authors, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.