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What do the tongue, arm, and leg muscles have in common? They all evolve from wandering cells and two different genes steer their development. Elena Vasyutina and Prof. Carmen Birchmeier have published these new findings in mice and chicken embryos, in the journal Genes and Development* (www.genesdev.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gad.346205). Muscular precursor cells derive from the somite, a segmented structure which exists in vertebrates during embryogenesis. These precursor cells can unchain themselves from their neighbouring cells at a specific point in time and wander to a specific point in the connective tissue, where the muscle of the tongue and the muscles of the arms and legs normally develop. Two different genes in the muscle precursor cells control this process. One gene expresses the CXCR4 receptor, a molecule which recognizes a messenger molecule (chemokine), the second gene expresses what scientists call tyrosine kinase receptor c-Met. Both genes act as chaperones of the wandering muscle precursor cells and ensure that such cells reach their destination, the result of which is normal muscle formation. Wandering processes during embryogenesis often resemble processes during cancer development. Indeed, both receptors, CXCR4 and met, play a role in the development of metastasis in breast and bowl cancer, two diseases that likewise exist of wandering cells.
*CXCR4 and Gab1 cooperate to control the development of migrating muscle progenitor cells
Elena Vasyutina1, Jürg Stebler2, Beate Brand-Saberi3, Stefan Schulz4, Erez Raz2, and Carmen Birchmeier1,5
1Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine, 13125 Berlin-Buch, Germany; 2Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, 37077 Göttingen, Germany; 3Institute of Anatomy and Cell Biology II, University of Freiburg, 79104 Freiburg, Germany; 4Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Otto-von-Guericke University, 39120 Magdeburg, Germany
5Corresponding author.
E-MAIL: cbirch@mdc-berlin.de, FAX 49-30-94 06 - 37 65
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Tongue of a mouse embryo. The arrows point to the muscle cells of the tongue that have been labeled ...
Elena Vasyutina/Copyright: MDC
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