University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 Multiple Roles of Ret Signaling in Mechanosensory Neuron Development Michael Scott Fleming University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Molecular Biology Commons, and the Neuroscience and Neurobiology Commons Recommended Citation Fleming, Michael Scott, "Multiple Roles of Ret Signaling in Mechanosensory Neuron Development" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1718. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1718 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1718 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Multiple Roles of Ret Signaling in Mechanosensory Neuron Development Abstract Somatosensation is critical for interaction with the surrounding environment. Somatosensory stimuli are detected by primary somatosensory neurons of the dorsal root ganglia and trigeminal ganglia, which detect distinct classes of stimuli, such as temperature, pain, and pressure. In Chapters 2 and 3 of this thesis, we focus on rapidly adapting low-threshold mechanoreceptors (RALTMRs), which mediate the detection of light touch. RALTMRs are molecularly defined yb the early embryonic expression of the receptor tyrosine kinase Ret. Ret is required for the development of central axonal projections of RALTMRs into the dorsal spinal cord. RET responds to the glial cell line-derived family of neurotrophic factors, which activate RET in combination with GPI-linked GFRα co-receptors. In vitro, RET can be activated by co-receptor expressed in the same cell (cis signaling) or by co-receptor expressed by neighboring cells (trans signaling), but previous studies suggest that trans RET signaling may not play a physiologically relevant role in vivo.