Development 126, 4257-4265 (1999) 4257 Printed in Great Britain © The Company of Biologists Limited 1999 DEV2454 Functional association of retinoic acid and hedgehog signaling in Xenopus primary neurogenesis Paula G. Franco*, Alejandra R. Paganelli*, Silvia L. López and Andrés E. Carrasco‡ Laboratorio de Embriología Molecular, Instituto de Biología Celular y Neurociencias, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Paraguay 2155, 3° piso, 1121, Buenos Aires, Argentina *These authors have contributed equally to this work and are listed in alphabetical order ‡Author for correspondence (e-mail:
[email protected]) Accepted 17 July; published on WWW 7 September 1999 SUMMARY Previous work has shown that the posteriorising agent downregulated Gli3 and upregulated Zic2. Thus, retinoic retinoic acid can accelerate anterior neuronal acid and hedgehog signaling have opposite effects on the differentiation in Xenopus laevis embryos (Papalopulu, N. prepattern genes Gli3 and Zic2 and on other genes acting and Kintner, C. (1996) Development 122, 3409-3418). To downstream in the neurogenesis cascade. In addition, elucidate the role of retinoic acid in the primary retinoic acid cannot rescue the inhibitory effect of neurogenesis cascade, we investigated whether retinoic acid NotchICD, Zic2 or sonic hedgehog on primary neurogenesis. treatment of whole embryos could change the spatial Our results suggest that retinoic acid acts very early, expression of a set of genes known to be involved in upstream of sonic hedgehog, and we propose a model for neurogenesis. We show that retinoic acid expands the N- regulation of differentiation and proliferation in the neural tubulin, X-ngnr-1, X-MyT1, X-Delta-1 and Gli3 domains plate, showing that retinoic acid might be activating and inhibits the expression of Zic2 and sonic hedgehog primary neurogenesis by repressing sonic hedgehog in the neural ectoderm, whereas a retinoid antagonist expression.