Wheeler Scott R, Kearney Joseph B, Guardiola Amaris R, Crews Stephen T
Program in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3280, USA.
Dev Biol. 2006 Jun 15;294(2):509-24. doi: 10.1016/j.ydbio.2006.03.016. Epub 2006 Apr 24.
Understanding the generation of neuronal and glial diversity is one of the major goals of developmental neuroscience. The Drosophila CNS midline cells constitute a simple neurogenomic system to study neurogenesis, cell fate acquisition, and neuronal function. Previously, we identified and determined the developmental expression profiles of 224 midline-expressed genes. Here, the expression of 59 transcription factors, signaling proteins, and neural function genes was analyzed using multi-label confocal imaging, and their expression patterns mapped at the single-cell level at multiple stages of CNS development. These maps uniquely identify individual cells and predict potential regulatory events and combinatorial protein interactions that may occur in each midline cell type during their development. Analysis of neural function genes, including those encoding peptide neurotransmitters, neurotransmitter biosynthetic enzymes, transporters, and neurotransmitter receptors, allows functional characterization of each neuronal cell type. This work is essential for a comprehensive genetic analysis of midline cell development that will likely have widespread significance given the high degree of evolutionary conservation of the genes analyzed.
了解神经元和神经胶质细胞多样性的产生是发育神经科学的主要目标之一。果蝇中枢神经系统中线细胞构成了一个简单的神经基因组系统，用于研究神经发生、细胞命运获得和神经元功能。此前，我们鉴定并确定了224个中线表达基因的发育表达谱。在此，利用多标记共聚焦成像分析了59个转录因子、信号蛋白和神经功能基因的表达，并在中枢神经系统发育的多个阶段在单细胞水平上绘制了它们的表达模式。这些图谱独特地识别了单个细胞，并预测了在每种中线细胞类型发育过程中可能发生的潜在调控事件和组合蛋白相互作用。对神经功能基因的分析，包括那些编码肽类神经递质、神经递质生物合成酶、转运体和神经递质受体的基因，能够对每种神经元细胞类型进行功能表征。这项工作对于中线细胞发育的全面遗传分析至关重要，鉴于所分析基因的高度进化保守性，其可能具有广泛的意义。
