Peggy R. Biga
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About Peggy
Dr. Biga's research focuses on understanding the mechanisms regulating skeletal muscle growth, repair, and metabolism. Currently, Dr. Biga's research is centered on how parental nutrition affects offspring growth and metabolism, with particular interest is how mom's dietary intake of specific nutrients affects her offspring in terms of growth potential and metabolic health. Additionally, Dr. Biga is interested in science policy related to nutrition, food, health, climate, and higher education. Dr. Biga is co-director of the new Science Policy Graduate Certificate Program at UAB.
Contributions
Publications
Summarizes the knowledge about myostatin in growth.
Defined how varying growth paradigms, or life-long growth potentials, are present in closely related species. This work led to a major aspect of my research program's focus on identifying mechanisms regulating organismal growth.
Details the identification of a second myostatin gene and an evolutionarily conserved GDF-11 gene in zebrafish. This work provided the groundwork for expanding our knowledge of the GDF genes in muscle growth.
Details an early evaluation of how growth hormone locally affects the expression of insulin-like growth factor genes in skeletal muscle tissue.
Describes how growth hormone acts locally at the muscle tissue level to regulate genes important in cell cycle maintenance.