The genes for the helix-loop-helix proteins Id6a, Id6b, Id1 and Id2 are specifically expressed in the ventral and dorsal domains of the fish developing somites.

Muscle differentiation is inhibited by members of the Id family that block the transcriptional effect of myogenic bHLH regulators by forming inactive heterodimers with them. Also, Id proteins promote cell proliferation by interacting with key regulators of the cell cycle. In order to determine the role of Id-encoding genes during fish development and especially in early myogenesis, we examined the expression patterns of Id1, Id2 and two nonallelic Id6 (Id6a and Id6b)-encoding genes in developing trout embryos. These four Id paralogs were found to exhibit discrete expression in the developing nervous system and in the eye rudiment. During the segmentation process, Id6a, Id6b and Id1 were expressed in the tail bud, the paraxial mesoderm and the ventral and dorsal domains of neoformed somites. As the somite matured in a rostrocaudal progression, the labelling for Id1 transcripts rapidly faded whereas labelling for Id6 transcripts was found to persist until at least the completion of segmentation. By contrast, Id2 transcripts were visualised transiently only in dorsal domains of neoformed somites and strongly accumulated in the pronephros. The preferential localisation of Id6a, Id6b, Id1 and Id2 transcripts within ventral and/or dorsal extremes of the developing somites, suggests that these areas, which were the last ones to express muscle-specific genes, contain dividing cells involved in somite expansion.