الفهرس 
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Abstract
The Nile Tilapia has a great economic value. However, these fish remain underutilized and show sub-optimal flesh production potential. Subsequently, scientists now tend to genetically improve the meat production these fish. To do this we first should understand the mechanism by which the muscles develop and grow and then the expression patterns of the genes controlling these histomorphological changes should be determined. Because the early stages of development, especially the pre-hatching stages, were extensively studied in several fish, we focused in this study on the early post-hatching stages including larval stage. Therefore the objectives of this study was to determine the histomorphological changes, with special concern to the hyperplasia, occurring in skeletal muscles (meat) in parallel with the changes in the temporal expression pattern of Myf5 and MyoG genes related to development and growth of skeletal muscles in an attempt to correlate the hyperplasia with the expression of these genes.
To achieve these objectives, muscle tissues samples from 120 Nile tilapia larvae at different ages(12 hour,2 days,3 days,4 days,6 days,8 days)post hatching larvae were collected and some were prepared for histological examination by light microscope and morphological examination by scanning electron microscope and some other samples used for molecular study. RNA was extracted from the latter and was reverse transcribed to cDNA which was used as a template for identification of Myf5 and MyoG gene expression using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and image J software.