building the nervous system Flashcards
how many neurons are in the brain and give % of where they are
10 to the power of 11, 19% in the cortex, 80% in cerebellum, 1% in the limbic system
what is the urbilateria theory
suggests the dorsal vs ventral NS developed as invetabrates due to a body twist
thought that verts and inverts are from a common ancestor there was just a body twist at some point.
how can you set aside tissue of neural identity
has to be during/immediately after gastrulation
it is achieved by preventing BMP signalling in ectodermal cells
what does gastrulation result in?
in mesoderm and the endoderm being inside and ectoderm being on the outside
what is the organisor?
a specialised bit of mesoderm
what does BMP essentially do?
keeps the ectoderm as ectoderm that will form skin
what does the organisor do to BMP? why aren’t all cells effected by this?
it has BMP antagonist signals, these cells that aren’t stimulated by BMP turn into neural ectoderm.
it cannot diffuse all the way across, only the cells close to the organisor are effected.
what is the neural plate?
a single layer of neural cells on ectoderm
what happens if take an animal cap from a pregastrula and grow in isolation? why?
form epidermis as there’s no BMP antagonist
what happens if take an animal cap from a gastrula and grow in isolation? why?
neural tissue forms and the BMP antagonist is present
what’s under the the ventral part of the neural tube?
what’s under the anterior part of the neural tube?
what’s under the rest of the neural tube?
Rod of Axial mesoderm
Prechordal mesoderm
notochord
where must a neural inducer molecule be expressed?
in the organiser
what happens if the neural inducer molecule is over expressed in an ectopic site?
would lead to the induction of a second axis
what happens if neural inducer activity is inhibited?
would prevent axis formation
what is gene redundancy?
when there’s back up genes, if something goes wrong with a gene such a mutation then there’s back ups.
how do the Antagonists stop BMP?
by either interacting with BMP or BMPR
how does Chordin antagonise BMP?
is binds to BMP preventing it from interacting with BMPR
what happens when BMP binds to BMPR? (5)
there’s a conformational change
Smad is phosphorylated
smad cannot enter the nucleus activating other genes which leads to SOX being inhibited.
Epidermis is formed
what do antagonist of BMP mean for SOX?
sox isn’t repressed
SOX can bind to proneural genes
a neural cell is formed
what is SOX?
a transcription factor
what fate does Wnt promote?
epidermal
what fate do FGF and FGFR promote?
Neural
what’s different about where the invertebrate homologues to BMP and Chordin’s are positioned?
they are on the ventral side.
what model is used to explain why you get different neural types along the A/P axis?
the activation-transformation model