The Homeobox Transcription Factor Barx2 Regulates Plasticity of Young Primary Myofibers

Copyright: © 2010 Meech et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Adult mammalian muscle retains incredible plasticity. Muscle growth and repair involves the activation of undifferentiated myogenic precursors called satellite cells. In some circumstances, it has been proposed that existing myofibers may also cleave and produce a pool of proliferative cells that can re-differentiate into new fibers. Such myofiber dedifferentiation has been observed in the salamander blastema where it may occur in parallel with satellite cell activation. Moreover, ectopic expression of the homeodomain transcription factor Msx1 in differentiated C2C12 myotubes has been shown to induce their dedifferentiation. While it remains unclear whether dedifferentiation and redifferentiaton occurs endogenously in mammalian muscle, there is considerable interest in induced dedifferentiation as a possible regenerative tool