Postnatal development of rabbit fast-twitch skeletal muscle: accumulation, isoform transition and fibre distribution of calsequestrin.

The time-course of disappearance of slow-cardiac calsequestrin (CS) and that of appearance of the skeletal CS isoform were investigated in developing fast-twitch skeletal muscle of the rabbit between postnatal days 1 and 60, along with changes in density of the ryanodine receptor (RyR)/Ca2+ release channel. Western blot data on skeletal muscle membranes, purification of two CS isoforms by phenyl-Sepharose chromatography, and their immunolocalization in muscle fibres, all show that both CS isoforms are coexpressed in neonatal muscles. Our results, at the protein level, indicate that the turning off of synthesis of cardiac CS and its total disappearance from fast-twitch fibres take place at critical periods between two and four weeks postnatally, i.e. past changes in the respective mRNA. In contrast, the accumulation in muscle membranes of both the RyR and the skeletal CS isoform proceeds steadily up to one month, to reach adult values at about two months of age. These findings seem to argue that myogenic factors, in addition to the morphogenetic influence on the sarcoplasmic reticulum from the neural input to the muscle, may be involved in the developmental transition of CS isoforms in mammalian fast-twitch muscle fibres.