Repellents working in the axon guidance also act as attractants

Chemical Signals as Attractants, Repellents and Aggregation Stimulants

Morphogens as conserved axon guidance cues.

Morphogen family proteins are now widely appreciated as axon guidance cues. Because their roles as morphogens are highly conserved across phylogeny, their functional conservation in axon guidance is now being rigorously examined. Recent studies suggest that morphogens are important in shaping topographic projections in chick and Drosophila visual systems, a process that occurs even later in dev...

Axon guidance

The nervous system has the job of controlling and monitoring events throughout the whole body. But, unlike endocrine cells, which control their targets through long-range chemical cues, neurons communicate through direct cellular contacts, or synapses. As the information content of the electrical signals used by neurons is limited, much of the meaning in neural communication is conveyed by the ...

Diffusion in axon guidance.

Axon guidance by target-derived diffusible factors plays an important role in the development of the nervous system. This paper considers the constraints imposed on this process by the mathematics of diffusion. A point source continuously producing a factor into an infinite three-dimensional volume is considered as a model for both the in vivo and in vitro situation. Basic constraints for effec...

microRNAs in axon guidance

Brain wiring is a highly intricate process in which trillions of neuronal connections are established. Its initial phase is particularly crucial in establishing the general framework of neuronal circuits. During this early step, differentiating neurons extend axons, which reach their target by navigating through a complex environment with extreme precision. Research in the past 20 years has unr...