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Published December 15, 2008 | Published
Journal Article Open

Competence, specification and commitment to an olfactory placode fate

Abstract

The nasal placode shares a common origin with other sensory placodes within a pre-placodal domain at the cranial neural plate border. However, little is known about early events in nasal placode development as it segregates from prospective lens, neural tube and epidermis. Here, Dlx3, Dlx5, Pax6 and the pan-neuronal marker Hu serve as molecular labels to follow the maturation of olfactory precursors over time. When competence to form olfactory placode was tested by grafting ectoderm from different axial levels to the anterior neural fold, we found that competence is initially broad for head, but not trunk, ectoderm and declines rapidly with time. Isolated olfactory precursors are specified by HH10, concomitant with their complete segregation from other placodal, epidermal and neural progenitors. Heterotopic transplantation of olfactory progenitors reveals they are capable of autonomous differentiation only 12 hours later, shortly before overt placode invagination at HH14. Taken together, these results show that olfactory placode development is a step-wise process whereby signals from adjacent tissues specify competent ectoderm at or before HH10, followed by gradual commitment just prior to morphological differentiation.

Additional Information

© The Company of Biologists Ltd 2008. Accepted 17 October 2008. First published online November 21, 2008. We thank Drs Andy Groves and Michael Kessel for cDNA clones, Dr Jhumku Kohtz for the pan-Dlx antibody, Dr James Millam for the chick GnRH-I antibody, Dr Andy Kowalczyk for use of his microscope, and Matt Jones, David Arce and Andrea Manzo for technical assistance. We are grateful to Dr Tatjana Sauka-Spengler for critical reading of the manuscript and to Dr Andrea Streit for many helpful discussions. This work was supported by DE16459 to M.B.-F. and partly by a HHMI Predoctoral Fellowship to S.B.

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Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 17, 2023