In an unexpected twist, a new study casts a classical protein in a surprising new role: Pax6, a well-recognized factor in brain and eye development in mice, appears to play a very different and crucial part in the development of the human brain.
The research, reported this week in linkurl:Cell Stem Cell,;http://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/ provides "exciting new insights into the fundamental process of neural induction," said linkurl:Kate Storey,;http://www.lifesci.dundee.ac.uk/groups/kate_storey/ a developmental biologist at the University of Dundee in the UK who was not involved in the research, in an email. Pax6 is one in a family of paired box (Pax6) transcription factors that control embryonic development in a variety of cell lineages. The best-studied of the Pax factors, Pax6 is highly conserved and important to the development of eyes, pancreas, and cerebrum across many species. Now,...
(green) derived from hESCs Image courtesy of Su-Chun Zhang |
Image courtesy of Su-Chun Zhang |
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