Regulation of downstream neuronal genes by proneural transcription factors during initial neurogenesis in the vertebrate brain.

Michelle Ware,Véronique David,Houda Hamdi-Rozé,Julien Le Friec,Valérie Dupé

doi:10.1186/s13064-016-0077-7

Abstract

BackgroundNeurons arise in very specific regions of the neural tube, controlled by components of the Notch signalling pathway, proneural genes, and other bHLH transcription factors. How these specific neuronal areas in the brain are generated during development is just beginning to be elucidated. Notably, the critical role of proneural genes during differentiation of the neuronal populations that give rise to the early axon scaffold in the developing brain is not understood. The regulation of their downstream effectors remains poorly defined.ResultsThis study provides the first overview of the spatiotemporal expression of proneural genes in the neuronal populations of the early axon scaffold in both chick and mouse. Overexpression studies and mutant mice have identified a number of specific neuronal genes that are targets of proneural transcription factors in these neuronal populations.ConclusionTogether, these results improve our understanding of the molecular mechanisms involved in differentiation of the first neuronal populations in the brain.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13064-016-0077-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Highlights

Neurons arise in very specific regions of the neural tube, controlled by components of the Notch signalling pathway, proneural genes, and other basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) transcription factors
To investigate the role of this network during formation of these neuronal populations in the developing mouse brain, the expression patterns of those markers, Nhlh1, Tagln3, Chga, Cntn2 and Stmn2 were analysed between E8.5 and E10.5 (Fig. 1)
We investigated the expression of Chga in Ascl1 null mutant embryos as its expression was more specific in the early neuronal populations (Fig. 1)

Summary

Introduction

Neurons arise in very specific regions of the neural tube, controlled by components of the Notch signalling pathway, proneural genes, and other bHLH transcription factors How these specific neuronal areas in the brain are generated during development is just beginning to be elucidated. The critical role of proneural genes during differentiation of the neuronal populations that give rise to the early axon scaffold in the developing brain is not understood The regulation of their downstream effectors remains poorly defined. Expression of specific neuronal transcription factors needs to be tightly controlled to ensure the correct patterning of neuronal populations both temporally and spatially [3] This patterning is regulated in part by the Notch signalling pathway, which has remained highly conserved throughout vertebrate evolution. In many neuronal tissues these proneural genes are expressed in complementary domains

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