From neurulation to postnatal processes, the requirements for FGF signaling in many aspects of neural precursor cell biology have been well documented. However, identifying a requirement for FGFs in a particular neurogenic process provides only an initial and superficial understanding of what FGF signaling is doing. How FGFs specify cell types in one instance, yet promote cell survival, prolife...

Mutations have been identified in a non-canonical Wnt signalling cascade (the planar cell polarity pathway) in several mouse genetic models of severe neural tube defects. In each of these models, neurulation fails to be initiated at the 3-4 somite stage, leading to an almost entirely open neural tube (termed craniorachischisis). Studies in whole embryo culture have identified a defect in the mo...

During vertebrate neurulation, the embryonic ectoderm is patterned into lineage progenitors for neural plate, neural crest, placodes and epidermis. Here, we use Xenopus laevis embryos to analyze the spatial and temporal transcriptome of distinct ectodermal domains in the course of neurulation, during the establishment of cell lineages. In order to define the transcriptome of small groups of cel...

All of the published theories of neurulation, (some of them forgotten but never disproved), are reviewed for the purpose of assessing just where we are in coming to a satisfactory explanation of this critical step in the formation of the brain and spinal cord, whose occasional failure leads to neural tube birth defects. A new approach to evaluating these theories is introduced, namely finite el...

fluorescent dyes Dil or DiO via microinjection to generate a fatemap of the non-neural ectoderm of Xenopus laevis embryos during neurulation. Our lineage analysis confirms that all placodes arise from a common primordium and indicates the regions of origin of the different placodes. We further use time-lapse videomicroscopy to analyse the cell movements and behaviour of ectodermal cells of deve...