In avians and mice, trunk neural crest migration is restricted to the anterior half of each somite. Sclerotome has been shown to play an essential role in this restriction; the potential role of other somite components in specifying neural crest migration is currently unclear. By contrast, in zebrafish trunk neural crest, migration on the medial pathway is restricted to the middle of the medial...

Trunk neural crest cells delaminate from the dorsal neural tube as an uninterrupted sheet; however, they convert into segmentally organized streams before migrating through the somitic territory. These neural crest cell streams join the segmental trajectories of pathfinding spinal motor axons, suggesting that interactions between these two cell types might be important for neural crest cell mig...

The neural crest is a multipotent, migratory cell population arising from the border of the neural and surface ectoderm. In mouse, the initial migratory neural crest cells occur at the five-somite stage. Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs), particularly BMP2 and BMP4, have been implicated as regulators of neural crest cell induction, maintenance, migration, differentiation and survival. Mouse ha...

We have investigated the molecular interactions underlying neural crest formation in Xenopus. Using chordin overexpression to antagonize endogenous BMP signaling in whole embryos and explants, we demonstrate that such inhibition alone is insufficient to account for neural crest induction in vivo. We find, however, that chordin-induced neural plate tissue can be induced to adopt neural crest fat...

The proposed pathways of chick cranial neural crest migration and their relationship to the rhombomeres of the hindbrain have been somewhat controversial, with differing results emerging from grafting and DiI-labelling analyses. To resolve this discrepancy, we have examined cranial neural crest migratory pathways using the combination of neurofilament immunocytochemistry, which recognizes early...

BACKGROUND Although the embryonic expression pattern of ADP ribosylation factor-like 6 interacting protein 1 (Arl6ip1) has been reported, its function in neural crest development is unclear. METHODS/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We found that knockdown of Arl6ip1 caused defective embryonic neural crest derivatives that were particularly severe in craniofacial cartilages. Expressions of the ectodermal pa...

Pax3 encodes a transcription factor expressed during mid-gestation in the region of the dorsal neural tube that gives rise to migrating neural crest populations. In the absence of Pax3, both humans and mice develop with neural crest defects. Homozygous Splotch embryos that lack Pax3 die by embryonic day 13.5 with cardiac defects that resemble those induced by neural crest ablation in chick mode...

Cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying differences in beak morphology likely involve interactions among multiple embryonic populations. We exchanged neural crest cells destined to participate in beak morphogenesis between two anatomically distinct species. Quail neural crest cells produced quail beaks in duck hosts and duck neural crest produced duck bills in quail hosts. These transforma...

To test whether larval selectivity at settlement contributes to distributional patterns of benthic infauna, we conducted three reciprocal sediment transplant experiments at 15-m-deep coarse-sand and muddy-sand sites (;3 km apart) on the continental shelf near Tuckerton, New Jersey. During 3to 5-d deployments in 1994, larvae of the surfclam, Spisula solidissima, selected coarse sand over muddy s...