Skeletal muscle forms the physical basis for all coordinated locomotion, a key feature of all higher animals. By weight, skeletal muscle is the dominant organ system of animals and contributes importantly not only to locomotion, but also to energy metabolism. Understanding the development of skeletal muscle into distinct lineages, some of which retain self-renewing properties allowing muscle repair, their functional adaptation into fast and slow fibres, and the tightly interlinked regulation of muscle protein homeostasis with physical demand and global energy demand all greatly contribute to a fundamental new insight.
