Centre for Developmental Neurobiology, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.
MRC Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.
Elife. 2019 Nov 18;8:e51381. doi: 10.7554/eLife.51381.
The cerebral cortex contains multiple areas with distinctive cytoarchitectonic patterns, but the cellular mechanisms underlying the emergence of this diversity remain unclear. Here, we have investigated the neuronal output of individual progenitor cells in the developing mouse neocortex using a combination of methods that together circumvent the biases and limitations of individual approaches. Our experimental results indicate that progenitor cells generate pyramidal cell lineages with a wide range of sizes and laminar configurations. Mathematical modeling indicates that these outcomes are compatible with a stochastic model of cortical neurogenesis in which progenitor cells undergo a series of probabilistic decisions that lead to the specification of very heterogeneous progenies. Our findings support a mechanism for cortical neurogenesis whose flexibility would make it capable to generate the diverse cytoarchitectures that characterize distinct neocortical areas.
大脑皮层包含多个具有独特细胞构筑模式的区域，但形成这种多样性的细胞机制仍不清楚。在这里，我们使用多种方法结合的方式研究了发育中的小鼠新皮层中单个祖细胞的神经元输出，这些方法共同规避了单一方法的偏见和局限性。我们的实验结果表明，祖细胞产生具有广泛大小和层状结构的锥体细胞谱系。数学模型表明，这些结果与皮质神经发生的随机模型是兼容的，在该模型中，祖细胞经历一系列导致非常异质后代特化的概率决策。我们的发现支持一种皮质神经发生的机制，其灵活性使其能够产生特征性不同新皮层区域的多样细胞构筑。
