MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology, King's College London, London, UK.
Nat Neurosci. 2010 Jun;13(6):673-9. doi: 10.1038/nn.2547. Epub 2010 May 9.
In the developing CNS, asymmetric cell division is critical for maintaining the balanced production of differentiating neurons while renewing the population of neural progenitors. In invertebrates, this process depends on asymmetric inheritance of fate determinants during progenitor divisions. A similar mechanism is widely believed to underlie asymmetrically fated divisions in vertebrates, but compelling evidence for this is missing. We used live imaging of individual progenitors in the intact zebrafish embryo CNS to test this hypothesis. We found that asymmetric inheritance of a subcellular domain is strongly correlated with asymmetric daughter fates and our results reveal an unexpected feature of this process. The daughter cell destined to become a neuron was derived from the more apical of the two daughters, whereas the more basal daughter inherited the basal process and replenished the apical progenitor pool.
在中枢神经系统的发育过程中，不对称细胞分裂对于维持分化神经元的平衡产生，同时更新神经祖细胞群体至关重要。在无脊椎动物中，这个过程依赖于祖细胞分裂过程中命运决定因素的不对称遗传。人们普遍认为，类似的机制是脊椎动物中不对称命运分裂的基础，但缺乏令人信服的证据。我们使用完整斑马鱼胚胎中枢神经系统中单个祖细胞的活体成像来检验这一假说。我们发现，亚细胞结构域的不对称遗传与不对称子细胞命运强烈相关，我们的结果揭示了这个过程的一个意外特征。注定成为神经元的子细胞来源于两个子细胞中更顶端的那个，而更基底的子细胞则继承了基底突起，并补充了顶端祖细胞池。
