L. Lecoin et al., GROWTH OF NEURAL CREST CELLS IN-VITRO IS ENHANCED BY EXTRACTS FROM SILKY FOWL EMBRYONIC-TISSUES, Pigment cell research, 7(4), 1994, pp. 210-216
In the Silky Fowl (SF) breed of chicken, most of the internal organs a
re infiltrated with melanocytes. Previous studies have shown that this
generalized mesodermal pigmentation is not due to a cell autonomous a
bnormality of the melanocytes but to environmental factors able to pro
mote both the homing of pigment cell precursors in abnormal embryonic
sites and their proliferation and differentiation. To analyse the mode
of these environmental cues, we tested the effect of SF embryo extrac
t (SFEE) on cultured quail neural crest cells as compared with that of
EE from normal chickens of the JA57 strain (JA57EE). We found that SF
EE enhances crest cell proliferation as judged by H-3-TdR incorporatio
n and cell counting. In contrast, no effect of SFEE was observed eithe
r on the proportion of cultured cells that are engaged into the melano
cytic differentiation pathway or on the amount of melanin produced by
each differentiated pigment cell. The simple observation, however, rev
eals that SFEE has a significant effect on pigmentation of the culture
d quail neural crest cells. This effect has therefore to be accounted
for by the general increase in cell number induced by SFEE. The questi
on is raised as to whether the in vivo SF phenotype is generated exclu
sively by this mechanism.