Melanocytes don’t always take the high road

Abstract

A central dogma of pigment cell development has been that the truncal neural crest (NC) cells that will ultimately give rise to skin melanocytes migrate under the epidermis along a dorsolateral route in developing embryos, while NC cells migrating along the ventral pathway between the neural tube and the dermamyotome contribute to the neurons and glia of the peripheral nervous system (Figure 1A) (Le Douarin and Kalcheim, 1999). The seminal work by Adameyko et al., recently published in Cell (Adameyko et al., 2009), challenges this simplistic dichotomy by providing strong evidence that NC derivatives in the ventral pathway are also an important origin of melanocytes in the skin.