Switching on lineage tracers using site-specific recombination.
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to C I Rodriguez.
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The precerebellar system provides the principal input to the cerebellum and is essential for coordinated motor activity. Using a FLP recombinase-based fate mapping approach, we provide direct evidence in the mouse that this ventral brainstem system derives from dorsally located rhombic neuroepithelium. Moreover, by fate mapping at the resolution of a gene expression pattern, we have uncovered an unexpected subdivision within the precerebellar primordium: embryonic expression of Wnt1 appears to identify the class of precerebellar progenitors that will later project mossy fibers from the brainstem to the cerebellum, as opposed to the class of precerebellar neurons that project climbing fibers. Differential gene expression therefore appears to demarcate two populations within the precerebellar primordium, grouping progenitors by their future type of axonal projection and synaptic partner rather than by final topographical position.
There are some neurological disorders with a pathological hallmark called spongiosis which include Creutzfeld-Jakob disease and its new variant, the Gertsmann-Straussler-Scheinker Syndrome and the Fatal Familial Insomnia in humans; and Scrapie and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, among others, in animals. The etiological agent has been considered either transmissible or hereditary or both. Curiously, this agent has no nucleic acids, is impossible to filter, is resistant to inactivation by chemical means, has not been cultured and is unobservable at electron microscopy. All of these facts have led to some researches to claim that these agents are similar to viruses appearing in computers. However, after almost fifty years of research, is still not possible to explain why and how such elements produce the diseases commented about. On the contrary, during these years have been possible to know that these entities called slow viral infections, transmissible amyloidosis, transmissible dementia, transmissible spongiform encephalopathies or prion diseases appear in individuals with genetical predispositions exposed to several worldwide immunological stressors. The possibility that prions are the consequence and not the cause of these diseases in animals and man is day by day more reliable, and supports the suggestion that a systematic intoxication due to pesticides as well as mycotoxin ingestion, produced mainly by different molds such as Aspergillus, Penicillium or Fusarium, seem to be the true etiology of these neurodegenerative disorders.