{"doi":"10.1242/dev.185389","title":"The mevalonate pathway is a critical regulator of tendon cell specification","abstract":"Tendons and ligaments are critical components of the musculoskeletal system, yet the pathways specifying this lineage remain poorly defined. Through a screen of known bioactive chemicals in zebrafish, we identified a new pathway regulating tendon cell induction. We established that statin, through inhibition of the mevalonate pathway, causes an expansion of the tendon progenitor population. Co-expression and live imaging studies indicate that the expansion does not involve an increase in cell proliferation, but rather results from re-specification of cells from the neural crest-derived sox10+/sox9a+ skeletal lineage. The effect on tendon cell expansion is specific to the geranylgeranylation branch of the mevalonate pathway and mediated by inhibition of Rac activity. This work establishes a novel role for the mevalonate pathway and Rac activity in regulating specification of the tendon lineage.","journal":"Development","year":2020,"id":88211,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":10,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9518,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":448367,"name":"Xubo Niu","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":447408,"name":"Matthew J. King","orcid":"0000-0002-2815-5923","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":447409,"name":"Marie-Therese Noedl","orcid":"0000-0001-6210-6044","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":94133,"name":"Clifford J. Tabin","orcid":"0000-0002-2957-4871","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":447410,"name":"Jenna L. Galloway","orcid":"0000-0003-3792-3290","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":447407,"name":"Jessica W. Chen","orcid":"0000-0003-4425-6369","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":122,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T22:00:56.736935Z","pmid":"32467241","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}