ANIMAL AND VEGETAL POLE CELLS OF EARLY XENOPUS EMBRYOS RESPOND DIFFERENTLY TO MATERNAL DORSAL DETERMINANTS - IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PATTERNING OF THE ORGANIZER
S. Darras et al., ANIMAL AND VEGETAL POLE CELLS OF EARLY XENOPUS EMBRYOS RESPOND DIFFERENTLY TO MATERNAL DORSAL DETERMINANTS - IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PATTERNING OF THE ORGANIZER, Development, 124(21), 1997, pp. 4275-4286
The maternal dorsal determinants required for the specification of the
dorsal territories of Xenopus early gastrulae are located at the vege
tal pole of unfertilised eggs and are moved towards the prospective do
rsal region of the fertilised egg during cortical rotation, While the
molecular identity of the determinants is unknown, there are dorsal fa
ctors in the vegetal cortical cytoplasm (VCC). Here, we show that the
VCC factors, when injected into animal cells activate the zygotic gene
s Siamois and Xnr3, suggesting that they act along the Wnt/beta-cateni
n pathway, In addition, Siamois and Xnr3 are activated at the vegetal
pole of UV-irradiated embryos, indicating that these two genes are tar
gets of the VCC factors in all embryonic cells, However, the consequen
ces of their activation in cells that occupy different positions along
the animal-vegetal axis differ, Dorsal vegetal cells of normal embryo
s or VCC-treated injected animal cells are able to dorsalise ventral m
esoderm in conjugate experiments but UV-treated vegetal caps do not ha
ve this property, This difference is unlikely to reflect different lev
els of activation of FGF or activin-like signal transduction pathways
but may reflect the activation of different targets of Siamois. Chordi
n, a marker of the head and axial mesoderm, is activated by the VCC/Si
amois pathway in animal cells but not in vegetal cells whereas cerberu
s, a marker of the anterior mesendoderm which lacks dorsalising activi
ty, can only be activated by the VCC/Siamois pathway in vegetal cells,
We propose that the regionalisation of the organiser during gastrulat
ion proceeds from the differential interpretation along the animal-veg
etal axis of the activation of the VCC/beta-catenin/Siamois pathway.