Topic
Body Patterning
About: Body Patterning is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 426 publications have been published within this topic receiving 29988 citations.
Papers published on a yearly basis
Papers
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that the intrinsic tendency of stem cells to make patterns can be harnessed by controlling colony geometries and provide a quantitative assay for studying paracrine signaling in early development.
Abstract: Embryos allocate cells to the three germ layers in a spatially ordered sequence. Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) can generate the three germ layers in culture; however, differentiation is typically heterogeneous and spatially disordered. We show that geometric confinement is sufficient to trigger self-organized patterning in hESCs. In response to BMP4, colonies reproducibly differentiated to an outer trophectoderm-like ring, an inner ectodermal circle and a ring of mesendoderm expressing primitive-streak markers in between. Fates were defined relative to the boundary with a fixed length scale: small colonies corresponded to the outer layers of larger ones. Inhibitory signals limited the range of BMP4 signaling to the colony edge and induced a gradient of Activin-Nodal signaling that patterned mesendodermal fates. These results demonstrate that the intrinsic tendency of stem cells to make patterns can be harnessed by controlling colony geometries and provide a quantitative assay for studying paracrine signaling in early development.
856 citations
TL;DR: The results indicate that BMPs neither act as secondary signals downstream of Sonic Hedghog in patterning the anteroposterior axis nor as signals from the interdigital mesenchyme in specifying digit identity, and it is found that the loss of both BMP2 and BMP4 results in a severe impairment of osteogenesis.
Abstract: Bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) family members, including BMP2, BMP4, and BMP7, are expressed throughout limb development. BMPs have been implicated in early limb patterning as well as in the process of skeletogenesis. However, due to complications associated with early embryonic lethality, particularly for Bmp2 and Bmp4, and with functional redundancy among BMP molecules, it has been difficult to decipher the specific roles of these BMP molecules during different stages of limb development. To circumvent these issues, we have constructed a series of mouse strains lacking one or more of these BMPs, using conditional alleles in the case of Bmp2 and Bmp4 to remove them specifically from the limb bud mesenchyme. Contrary to earlier suggestions, our results indicate that BMPs neither act as secondary signals downstream of Sonic Hedghog (SHH) in patterning the anteroposterior axis nor as signals from the interdigital mesenchyme in specifying digit identity. We do find that a threshold level of BMP signaling is required for the onset of chondrogenesis, and hence some chondrogenic condensations fail to form in limbs deficient in both BMP2 and BMP4. However, in the condensations that do form, subsequent chondrogenic differentiation proceeds normally even in the absence of BMP2 and BMP7 or BMP2 and BMP4. In contrast, we find that the loss of both BMP2 and BMP4 results in a severe impairment of osteogenesis.
636 citations
TL;DR: Four transcription factors, COUP-TFI, Emx2, Pax6, and Sp8, with graded expression across the embryonic cortical axes, are shown to determine sizes and positions of cortical areas by specifying or repressing area identities within cortical progenitors.
608 citations
TL;DR: The results show that all posterior limb mesenchyme cells, as well as the ectoderm, respond to Shh from the ZPA and become the bone, muscle, and skin of the posterior limb.
542 citations
TL;DR: Recent novel insight is reviewed into the modalities of Hox protein function in imparting specific identity to anatomical regions of the vertebral column, and in controlling the emergence of these tissues concomitantly with providing them with axial identity.
533 citations
Related Topics (5)
Performance Metrics
| Year | Papers |
|---|---|
| 2020 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2 |
| 2018 | 11 |
| 2017 | 22 |
| 2016 | 25 |
| 2015 | 19 |