Abstract
During vertebrate gastrulation, the cells of the dorsal ectoderm give rise to the central nervous system; ventral ectoderm differentiates into epidermis. In amphibians, the neuralization of the dorsal ectoderm is mediated by signals from the dorsal lip of the blastopore (Spemann’s organizer). An ectopic dorsal lip will neuralize ventral ectoderm (1). Ectodermal expiants (or “animal cap” expiants), cultured alone, will form only epidermis; recombined with a dorsal lip, these expiants form neural tissue (2). The recognition that the dorsal lip was both necessary and sufficient for neural induction implied that the organizer was the source of a soluble, neural-inducing factor that could neuralize ectoderm in a direct, noncell autonomous manner; signals from the organizer provide an instructive signal to the ectoderm to form neural tissue. Thus, for decades, the consensus view was that epidermis was the “default” state of the ectoderm.
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Weinstein, D., Chang, C., Lagna, G., Suzuki, A., Wilson, P., Hemmati-Brivanlou, A. (1997). Neural Induction in the Frog Xenopus laevis . In: Aono, T., Sugino, H., Vale, W.W. (eds) Inhibin, Activin and Follistatin. Serono Symposia USA. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1874-6_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1874-6_21
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