Neurulation in zebrafish

Neurulation is a series of cell movements and shape changes, inductive interactions, and changes in gene expression that partitions tissues into a discrete neural tube. It is one of those early and significant morphogenetic events that define an important tissue, in this case the nervous system, and it's also an event that can easily go wrong, producing relatively common birth defects like holoprosencephaly and spina bifida. Neurulation has been a somewhat messy phenomenon for comparative embryology, too, because there are not only subtle differences between different vertebrate lineages in precisely how they segregate the neural tissue, but there are also differences along the rostrocaudal axis of an individual organism. A recent review by Lowery and Sive, though, tidies up the confusion and pulls disparate stories together.

Continue reading "Neurulation in zebrafish" (on Pharyngula)