Factors involved in signal transduction during vertebrate myogenesis.

Muscle is a contractile tissue of animals, dedicated to produce force and cause motion. In higher animals, there are two types of muscle tissue: (a) striated muscle, including all voluntary skeletal muscles and involuntary cardiac muscle, and (b) smooth muscle consisting of involuntary muscles, including those of the viscera, blood vessels, and uterus. Although muscle growth and regeneration take place throughout vertebrate life, the heart is the first organ to start functioning, with continued development until delivery. Skeletal muscles, on the other hand, develop in four successive, temporally distinct phases of embryonic, fetal, neonatal, and adult muscle with the postnatal phase being basically hypertrophy. Unlike terminally differentiated skeletal and cardiac muscles in adults, smooth muscle cells retain their plasticity and the phenotype can change reversibly in response to environmental changes. For the past 20 years, the availability of gene recombination technology directed the focus of studies on transcription factors and signaling molecules, and we would like to review what has been explored by recent studies on myogenesis.