Objective: The phenomenon of fibroblast overgrowth is one of the major problems encountered during long-term culture such as myoblast culture. The first goal of the study is to determine the effects of proline analogue and cytosine arabinoside to reduce fibroblasts in myoblast culture. The second goal is to investigate whether the chemicals influence the growth and differentiation of myoblast.

Method: Muscle tissues were obtained from legs of healthy men, and then fibroblasts and myoblasts were isolated and cultured. Those mixed cells were divided into three groups; control group, proline analogue (cis-hydroxyproline) treated group and cytosine arabinoside (araC) treated group. We evaluated the effectiveness of cis-hydroxyproline and araC on selective removal of fibroblasts in culture. We have also determined if cis-hydroxyproline and araC could alter differentiation of myoblast in each group.

Results: The treatment with araC was effective to eliminate fibroblasts comparing to the control group (p＜0.05) while there was no statistically significant difference between proline analogue and control group (p＞0.05). Myoblasts of all three groups were differentiated into myotube.

Conclusion: Using araC, we could reduce a number of fibroblasts in myoblast culture where contamination and subsequent overgrowth with fibroblasts remained a problem.