The earliest step in vertebrate heart formation, specification of cardiac progenitors, is poorly understood.
Protocadherins are expressed throughout the nervous system and are involved in synapse formation, specification and maintaining, which make them potential candidate genes for schizophrenia.
Recent studies have demonstrated roles for MKPs during development in zebrafish: dusp4 is required for endoderm specification in zebrafish (Brown et al., 2008), and dusp6 is required for embryonic axis formation and specification of cardiac progenitor cells regulating heart size (Tsang et al., 2004; Molina et al., 2009).
The crucial step in DV axis formation is specification of the dorsal and ventral mesoderm.
While it is known that specific factors secreted from the tips of the ureteric tree are critical for the induction of nephron formation, the specification, segmentation and differentiation of non-tip regions of the ureteric epithelium is not well understood.
Barrow et al. [7] recently showed that axodendritic contact is closely followed by rapid accumulation of neuroligins that specifically interact and co-transport receptors such as NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartic acid), thereby initiating formation and specification of synapses.
The epiblast proliferates to provide the substrate for axis formation, germlayer specification, and gastrulation.
During cardiac formation, cellular specification, differentiation, and rearrangement are tightly regulated by an intricate signaling network.
This pattern is founded during the formation and specification of neural stem cells.
Furthermore, it is well known that TFs are amongst the targets of the complex paracrine signalling pathways that underpin pattern formation, tissue specification, and differentiation in metazoans.
