A multigene family of paired-box-containing genes (Pax genes) has been identified in the mouse. In this report, we describe the expression pattern of Pax-6 during embryogenesis and the isolation of cDNA clones spanning the entire coding region. The Pax-6 protein consists of 422 amino acids as deduced from the longest open reading frame and contains, in addition to the paired domain, a paired-ty...

Pax-6 genes have been identified from a broad range of invertebrate and vertebrate animals and shown to be always involved in early eye development. Therefore, it has been proposed that the various types of eyes evolved from a single eye prototype, by a Pax-6-dependent mechanism. Here we describe the characterization of a cephalochordate Pax-6 gene. The single amphioxus Pax-6 gene (AmphiPax-6) ...

Proper growth and development of multicellular organisms requires precise regulation of developmental genes. One aspect of this regulation is at the level of transcription from the gene promoters. As an initial approach to understanding the regulation of the Pax-6 gene, which plays an important role in eye development and perhaps in other developmental processes, we characterized a promoter reg...

Pax-6 is a master regulator of eye development and is expressed in the dorsal and ventral iris during newt lens regeneration. We show that expression of Pax-6 during newt lens regeneration coincides with cell proliferation. By knocking down expression of Pax-6 via treatment with morpholinos, we found that proliferation of iris pigment epithelial cells was dramatically reduced both in vitro and ...

Wnt signaling regulates a wide range of developmental processes such as proliferation, cell migration, axon guidance, and cell fate determination. In this report, we studied the expression of secreted frizzled related protein-2 (SFRP-2), which codes for a putative Wnt inhibitor, in the developing nervous system. SFRP-2 is expressed in several discrete neuroepithelial domains, including the dien...

We have developed an in vitro model of the isolated chicken neural plate. Here we demonstrate that even in the absence of notochord, the neural plate rapidly develops a typical dorsoventral patterning. This observation suggests that the ventral cell types are specified or at least predetermined prior to notochord formation and that permissive conditions are sufficient for differentiation of ven...

The Pax gene family consists of nine members encoding nuclear transcription factors. Their temporally and spatially restricted expression pattern during embryogenesis suggests that they may play a key role during embryogenesis. Direct evidence for the important role of the Pax genes during embryonic development has been demonstrated by the correlation of mouse developmental mutants and human sy...

Pax-6 is a member of the vertebrate Pax gene family, which is structurally related to the Drosophila pair-rule gene, paired. In mammals, Pax-6 is expressed in several discrete domains of the developing CNS and has been implicated in neural development, although its precise role remains elusive. We found a novel Small eye rat strain (rSey2) with phenotypes similar to mouse and rat Small eye. Ana...