Sun Xutong, Okuyama Makiko, Miyazaki Katsumi, Zhang Shicui, Wada Hiroshi
Seto Marine Biological Laboratory, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, 459 Shirahama, Nishimuro-gun, Wakayama 649-2211, Japan.
Gene. 2003 Jul 17;312:111-6. doi: 10.1016/s0378-1119(03)00606-1.
The ascidian nervous system is extremely simple, although the structure of it is comparable with the complex vertebrate nervous system. This simplicity makes the ascidian nervous system a good model to understand how the neuronal circuit is built up in the chordate nervous system. In order to study the formation of the neuronal circuit at the single cell level, molecular markers to characterize specific single cells are desired. In the present paper, we describe the gene expression pattern of CIGL: an ascidian homologue of Goliath, a Drosophila RING-finger gene. In the early embryonic stage, CiGl is expressed in the lateral part of the neural tube and in several peripheral nerve cells. Later in the larval stage, CiGl specifically marks ocellus: one of the pigment cells in the ascidian brain, which is involved in the photoreceptive system. CiGl will be useful to understand the differentiation mechanism of ocellus, and especially to test the model proposed by. In addition, the finding of this single cells specific gene expression pattern at a certain developmental stage encourages us to look for more genes which mark single cells, especially those that have not been well characterized.
海鞘的神经系统极其简单，尽管其结构可与复杂的脊椎动物神经系统相媲美。这种简单性使海鞘神经系统成为理解脊索动物神经系统中神经元回路如何构建的良好模型。为了在单细胞水平研究神经元回路的形成，需要用于表征特定单细胞的分子标记。在本文中，我们描述了CIGL的基因表达模式：CIGL是果蝇环指基因Goliath的海鞘同源物。在胚胎早期阶段，CiGl在神经管的外侧部分和几个外周神经细胞中表达。在幼虫后期，CiGl特异性标记眼点：眼点是海鞘脑中的色素细胞之一，参与光感受系统。CiGl将有助于理解眼点的分化机制，特别是用于检验所提出的模型。此外，在特定发育阶段发现这种单细胞特异性基因表达模式鼓励我们寻找更多标记单细胞的基因，尤其是那些尚未得到充分表征的基因。
