Abstract
During skeletal muscle differentiation in vivo and in vitro AChE activity fluctuates and there are alterations in the spatial localization of the enzyme within the muscle fiber. Histochemical studies demonstrated AChE activity in the cytoplasm of mononucleated myogenic cells of the chick embryo (Gerebtzoff, 1959). Electron microscopy of the rabbit myodermatome revealed localization of AChE reaction product in mononuclear myoblasts at the nuclear envelope, the endoplasmic reticulum and some tubules of the Golgi complex (Tennyson et al, 1971). Acetylcholine receptor (AChR) was also found in myoblasts at this stage and choline acetyltransferase activity was detectable in neural tube-spinal ganglia (Grubic et al., 1984). Therefore, components of the cholinergic system are expressed in neural tissues and muscle, long before the establishment of functional neuromuscular contacts. It has been hypothesized that at this early stage, AChE and butyrylcholinesterase act as tropic or trophic factors for ingrowing motor axons (Layer et al., 1988). When myotubes fuse to form multinucleate myotubes, there is a significant increase in AChE activity, as observed in studies of avian and mammalian muscle in vivo (Mumenthaler and Engel, 1961; Tennyson et al., 1973) and in culture (Rieger et al., 1980; Inestrosa et al., 1983). The localization of AChE in noninnervated myotubes also varies at different stages of development, and may be species-specific. Uniform diffuse distribution, with no preferential localization was observed in aneurally grown chick (Engel, 1961) and rat (Rieger et al, 1980) cultures, while in quail (Rotundo et al., 1992), mouse muscle C2 cell line (Inestrosa et al., 1982) and Xenopus muscle cultures (Moody-Corbett and Cohen, 1981) patchy accumulations of AChE were noted at the sarcolemma. When developing myofibers are innervated, AChE becomes concentrated at the neuromuscular junction, although some enzyme also remains detectable extrajunctionally. The relative amounts and patterns of the different molecular forms of extrajunctional AChE activity in adult muscle differ between species and also vary between different types of skeletal muscle within the same species (reviewed by Toutant and Massoulie, 1987, and Massoulie et al., 1993).
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Grubič, Z., Miranda, A.F. (1995). Developmental Expression of Acetylcholinesterase in Skeletal Muscle. In: Quinn, D.M., Balasubramanian, A.S., Doctor, B.P., Taylor, P. (eds) Enzymes of the Cholinesterase Family. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1051-6_6
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