Regensburg 2016 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 28: Systems Biology & Gene Expression and Signalling
BP 28.6: Vortrag
Dienstag, 8. März 2016, 11:45–12:00, H44
Integration of morphogen signals in neural tube patterning — •Marcin Zagórski1, Anna Kicheva1,2, Gašper Tkačik1, James Briscoe2, and Tobias Bollenbach1 — 1IST Austria, Klosterneuburg, Austria — 2The Francis Crick Institute, London, UK
Early in vertebrate development, different neuronal subtypes are generated from neural progenitor cells arrayed along the dorsal-ventral axis of the neural tube. This pattern of neural progenitors is established by the morphogens Shh and BMP which form opposing concentration profiles and control the expression of target genes at defined positions. How the two morphogen signals are integrated to control target gene expression is poorly understood. To address this, we exposed naïve chick neural plate explants to a broad range of defined concentrations of the two morphogens. This allowed the construction of a decoding map that describes the dependence of the target gene expression pattern on the two morphogen concentrations. Strikingly, we obtained a similar map by using a maximum likelihood estimation method to extrapolate neural tube pattern from in vivo measurements of morphogen signaling profiles and gene expression. Both decoding maps correctly predicted target gene boundary shifts in embryos with altered Shh signaling. Moreover, a simple model of a gene regulatory network that integrates the morphogen signals was sufficient to recapitulate this behaviour, providing mechanistic insight into the observed shifts in target gene domains.