MYOD1 and embryonal carcinoma: In the mouse myoblast cell line C2C12, quiescent stem cells arise concomitant with contractile cells when the cells are cultured differentiation promoting medium (Yoshida et al., 1998), and when MyoD is misexpressed in P19 embryonic carcinoma cells, the gene activates pre-myogenic rather than myogenic genes, and does so directly (Gianakopoulos et al., 2011).