Journal
NATURE GENETICS
Volume 36, Issue 1, Pages 88-93Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/ng1280
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Funding
- MRC [G0100151] Funding Source: UKRI
- Medical Research Council [G0100151] Funding Source: Medline
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Vertebrate skeletal muscles comprise distinct fiber types that differ in their morphology, contractile function, mitochondrial content and metabolic properties. Recent studies identified the transcriptional coactivator PGC-1 as a key mediator of the physiological stimuli that modulate fiber-type plasticity in postembryonic development(1). Although myoblasts become fated to differentiate into distinct kinds of fibers early in development, the identities of regulatory proteins that determine embryonic fiber-type specification are still obscure. Here we show that the gene u-boot (ubo), a mutation in which disrupts the induction of embryonic slow-twitch fibers(2), encodes the zebrafish homolog of Blimp-1, a SET domain containing transcription factor that promotes the terminal differentiation of B lymphocytes in mammals(3). Expression of ubo is induced by Hedgehog (Hh) signaling in prospective slow muscle precursors, and its activity alone is sufficient to direct slow-twitch fiber specific development by naive myoblasts. Our data provide the first molecular insight into the mechanism by which a specific group of muscle precursors is driven along a distinct pathway of fiber-type differentiation in response to positional cues in the vertebrate embryo.
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