SPATIOTEMPORALLY EXACT CDNA LIBRARIES FROM QUAIL EMBRYOS - A RESOURCEFOR STUDYING NEURAL CREST DEVELOPMENT AND NEUROCRISTOPATHIES

The neural crest is of fundamental importance in the development of th e head and peripheral nervous system, in the evolution of the vertebra tes, and clinically because it gives rise to developmental abnormaliti es and neoplasms in humans, We have established a resource for studyin g the development of the neural crest by systematically constructing c DNA libraries horn spatiotemporally exact neural crest and related cel l populations, Neural crest populations were obtained from vagal and t horacic axial levels and from branchial arches, at premigratory and ea rly and late migratory stages, at localization stages, and after diffe rentiation into dorsal root ganglion cells, Schwann cells, sympathetic neurons, adrenal medullary cells, and melanocytes. Libraries were con structed using several methods developed to approach the issues of mak ing representative libraries from small amounts of tissue, The fidelit y and usefulness Elf the libraries were tested, and this revealed that they expressed a variety of sequences such as integrins, CAMs, growth factors and their receptors, protein-tyrosine kinases, and phosphatas es. Differential display also revealed a unique combination of cDNA sp ecies; We then selected libraries spatio-temporally appropriate for ep ithelium-mesenchyme transformation and probed for TGF-beta-related seq uences, As anticipated, we confirmed the presence of TGF-beta 2 and do rsalin-1 but could not detect TGF-beta 1. We also revealed new express ion sites, defined by the origin of the libraries, of receptors known to be expressed elsewhere (Tsk 7L; TBRII), We anticipate that this col lection of cDNA libraries will be of use in studying normal and abnorm al neural crest development, by both homology searches and differentia l expression approaches, with spatiotemporal expression information be ing inherent in the initial screen. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.