Semaphorins have been implicated in the regulation of axon pathfinding, sometimes acting as inhibitory guidance molecules, and other times attractive. An understanding of the complex processes involved in promoting and inhibiting axon growth will be crucial for understanding both diseases of neural development, and the conditions under which axon regeneration after injury can occur. Semaphorins also are thought to play a role in controlling the related processes of cell migration during development, metastasis and invasive growth. Cranial neural crest cells migrate from the neural tube to form craniofacial structures and peripheral nervous system. Errors in migration of cranial neural crest during development underlies many birth defects in craniofacial structure. An investigation of the mechanisms by which semaphorins control neural crest migration will provide insight into craniofacial development, and perhaps also general mechanisms of invasive growth involved in cancer progression.
The aim of this application is to understand the in vivo function of one semaphorin, Sema3D, in guiding retinotectal axon pathfinding and neural crest cell migration in the developing zebrafish. Sema3D's role in guiding retinal axons across the midline and in topographic mapping onto the tectum will be investigated. In addition, Sema3D's role in controlling cell motility will be investigated to test the hypotheses that Sema3D induces the onset of neural crest migration, and/or maintains separation of migrating neural crest streams. Our strategy is to examine effects of both Sema3D ectopic expression and Sema3D loss-of-function on the development of these systems, and on dynamic behaviors of living growth cones and migrating neural crest cells in vivo. The zebrafish embryo is ideally suited to the combination of approaches we have developed. With transgenic zebrafish, Sema3D can be misexpressed in select cells at any desired developmental stage. In addition, Sema3D function can be disrupted with antisense or dominant negative methods. Time-lapse microscopy allows direct visualization of the responses of living growth cones or migrating cells in the embryo. Thus the proposed experiments will likely provide novel insights into how semaphorins regulate retinal axon development and neural crest cell migration within the complex in vivo environment.
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