kaleidoscopik

Transgenic manipulations are starting to feel like an address book. You flox your gene and the look up the promoter in your fave neighborhood. I guess if the brain is the world then Foxg1 corresponds to a continent and Emx1 is a big important nation in that continent. Funny how hard it is to avoid a hemisphere analogy. Zhou et al use the technique on an axon-guiding cell-adhesion molecule to piece apart the necessity of Celsr3 in the dorsal versus ventral telencephalon for connecting major fiber tracts. If Celsr3 is knocked out mainly in layer 5 of the neocortex, the connections between the cortex and the thalamus are generally spared. I don’t quite get what the ‘handshake hypothesis’ is yet. Need more background in axon guidance.

Early Forebrain Wiring: Genetic Dissection Using Conditional Celsr3 Mutant Mice
Libing Zhou, Isabelle Bar, Younès Achouri, Kenneth Campbell, Olivier De Backer, Jean M. Hebert, Kevin Jones, Nicoletta Kessaris, Catherine Lambert de Rouvroit, Dennis O’Leary, William D. Richardson, Andre M. Goffinet, Fadel Tissir