Growth Factors and Cytokines in Skeletal Muscle Development, Growth, Regeneration and Disease (Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology)

This book
describes the diverse roles that growth factors and cytokines play in skeletal
muscle. The extracellular environment has profound effects on the biology of
skeletal muscle. The soluble portion of this environment includes a rich milieu
of growth factors and cytokines which have been shown to regulate virtually all
facets of the response of skeletal muscle to external stimuli, whether it be
exercise induced metabolic shifts, remodeling in response to trauma or loading
of the ongoing pathology associated with neuromuscular disease.

The
chapters included in this work illustrate growth factors that directly affect
skeletal muscle cells and those which influence non-muscle cells that
contribute to the biology of skeletal muscle as a whole tissue. The current
state of the art, with the advent of systems biology, allows for the
delineation of signaling networks which are regulated by suites of growth
factors. This is in stark contrast to early more traditional studies, which
only examined the effects of isolated growth factors on the activity of
skeletal muscle precursor cells in tissue culture.

The work
presented in this volume ranges from reviewing and analyzing the roles of
individual growth factors in detail, to the complex interplay of multiple
soluble factors in the control of muscle functional, and dysfunctional states.
The material covered in this volume will particularly suit readers from a range
of research fields spanning general muscle biology and physiology, and those
working on diseases and conditions affecting skeletal muscle both directly and
indirectly.