Neural Induction 2 Flashcards
Khokha et al. (2005): BMP antagonist depletion - What model organism was used? Why?
Xenopus tropicalis. It has a simple diploid genome which is easily targeted by AS morpholinos. It also has a short generation time.
Khokha et al. (2005): BMP antagonist depletion - What key assay showed the redundancy of BMP inhibitors?
The presence or absence of Sox2 in in-situ hybridization.
Khokha et al. (2005): BMP antagonist depletion - What was the major finding of the paper?
BMP inhibitors noggin, chordin, and follistatin act in a redundant manner to specify dorsal ectoderm fate.
Khokha et al. (2005): BMP antagonist depletion - What were the 5 BMP inhibitors also expressed in the Spemann Organizer?
Noggin, follistatin, chordin, xnr3 cerberus.
Khokha et al. (2005): BMP antagonist depletion - How did the authors cause the loss of BMP inhibitor function?
Using morpholino antisense knockdown.
Khokha et al. (2005): BMP antagonist depletion - What assay did the authors use to visualize the effects of their BMP inhibitor knowckdown?
Sox2 in-situ hybridization.
In what 2 ways can morpholino antisense knockdown work?
- Translation blocking
2. Splicing modification
Khokha et al. (2005): BMP antagonist depletion - What did the authors determine about individual BMP inhibitor knowckdown?
That individual knockdown does not alter neural induction.
Khokha et al. (2005): BMP antagonist depletion - How did the authors determine that the knockdowns were actually targeting the BMP pathway?
Using rescue experiments.
Khokha et al. (2005): BMP antagonist depletion - How did the authors show that the ventralization is due to loss of BMP inhibition and not loss of the organizer?
Triple knockdown still resulted in expression of Spemann organizer genes.
Are the mechanisms underlying neural induction from the Khokha et al. (2005) paper conserved in all species? Elaborate.
No. They’re in Protostomes (flies and molluscs)(homologous genes) but not in most deuterostomes, only vertebrates.
