Expression of the neurotrophin brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and its receptor trkB in the ganglion cell layer of the Xenopus retina during retinal ganglion cell (RGC) dendritic arborization indicates that BDNF is spatially and temporally available to influence RGC morphological differentiation (; ). BDNF promotes RGC axon arborization in vivo by acting as a target-derived trophic fac...

Neurons are the “delicate and elegant…butterflies of soul,” as Santiago Ramón y Cajal famously put it in his memoir ([Zwirn, 2015][1]). interconnect throughout brain body via elaborate arborization their dendrites axon. Their cytoskeleton, intricate array

The morphogenesis of several types of sensory axon branching patterns has been described by cobalt filling the cereal nerve of the grasshopper embryo at a series of different stages in development, thus staining the earliest sensory axons as they grow through the CNS. This embryonic sensory projection contains all five types of cereal afferents seen in the adult, and no new sensory tracts are a...

The functional geometry of the reconstructed dendritic arborization of Purkinje neurons is the object of this work. The combined effects of the local geometry of the dendritic branches and of the membrane mechanisms are computed in passive configuration to obtain the electrotonic structure of the arborization. Steady-currents applied to the soma and expressed as a function of the path distance ...

The dendritic arborization (da) neurons of the Drosophila peripheral nervous system (PNS) provide an excellent model system in which to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying class-specific dendrite morphogenesis. To facilitate molecular analyses of class-specific da neuron development, it is vital to obtain these cells in a pure population. Although a range of different cell, and tiss...

Neuronal arborization is regulated by cell-autonomous and nonautonomous mechanisms including endosomal signaling via BDNF/TrkB. The endosomal Na⁺/H⁺ exchanger 6 (NHE6) is mutated in a new autism-related disorder. NHE6 functions to permit proton leak from endosomes, yet the mechanisms causing disease are unknown. We demonstrate that loss of NHE6 results in overacidification of the endosomal comp...

Intracellular mRNA localization is a conserved mechanism for spatially regulating protein production in polarized cells, such as neurons. The mRNA encoding the translational repressor Nanos (Nos) forms ribonucleoprotein (RNP) particles that are dendritically localized in Drosophila larval class IV dendritic arborization (da) neurons. In nos mutants, class IV da neurons exhibit reduced dendritic...

A novel idea is emerging that a large molecular repertoire is common to the nervous and immune systems, which might reflect the existence of novel neuronal functions for immune molecules in the brain. Here, we show that the transmembrane adaptor signaling protein CD3ζ, first described in the immune system, has a previously uncharacterized role in regulating neuronal development. Biochemical and...