Université catholique de Louvain, Institute of Neuroscience, Laboratory of Neural Differentiation, 55 Avenue Hippocrate, Box (B1.55.11), 1200, Brussels, Belgium.
Cell Mol Life Sci. 2014 Mar;71(5):813-29. doi: 10.1007/s00018-013-1398-x. Epub 2013 Jun 14.
Understanding how thousands of different neuronal types are generated in the CNS constitutes a major challenge for developmental neurobiologists and is a prerequisite before considering cell or gene therapies of nervous lesions or pathologies. During embryonic development, spinal motor neurons (MNs) segregate into distinct subpopulations that display specific characteristics and properties including molecular identity, migration pattern, allocation to specific motor columns, and innervation of defined target. Because of the facility to correlate these different characteristics, the diversification of spinal MNs has become the model of choice for studying the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the generation of multiple neuronal populations in the developing CNS. Therefore, how spinal motor neuron subpopulations are produced during development has been extensively studied during the last two decades. In this review article, we will provide a comprehensive overview of the genetic and molecular mechanisms that contribute to the diversification of spinal MNs.
了解中枢神经系统中数千种不同神经元类型的产生是发育神经生物学家面临的主要挑战，也是考虑对神经损伤或病变进行细胞或基因治疗的前提条件。在胚胎发育过程中，脊髓运动神经元 (MNs) 会分离成不同的亚群，这些亚群具有特定的特征和属性，包括分子身份、迁移模式、分配到特定的运动柱以及特定靶标的神经支配。由于能够将这些不同的特征联系起来，脊髓 MNs 的多样化已成为研究发育中中枢神经系统中多种神经元群体产生的分子和细胞机制的首选模型。因此，在过去的二十年中，人们广泛研究了脊髓运动神经元亚群在发育过程中是如何产生的。在这篇综述文章中，我们将全面概述有助于脊髓 MN 多样化的遗传和分子机制。
