The role of Sonic Hedgehog in postnatal mouse lung development

It is popular known that hedgehog signaling pathway plays an important role, as main regulator, in the normal development of many tissues such as lung in most animals. As the key protein of hedgehog signaling pathway, sonic hedgehog (Shh) has shown to be critical in branching morphogenesis of the lung, where it is expressed in the branching epithelium and essential for the mesenchymal-epithelial crosstalk that guides branching and epithelial tube elongation as well as smooth muscle cell/myofibroblast differentiation. The expression of Shh during embryogenesis has been found and investigated. Epithelial cell spec…