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First published online 30 August 2006
doi: 10.1242/dev.02558

This Article Figures Only Full Text Full Text (PDF) Supplementary Material An erratum has been published All Versions of this Article: dev.02558v1 dev.02558v2 133/19/3817    most recent Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by O'Donnell, M. Articles by Saint-Jeannet, J.-P. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by O'Donnell, M. Articles by Saint-Jeannet, J.-P.

Functional analysis of Sox8 during neural crest development in Xenopus

Michael O'Donnell^*,, Chang-Soo Hong^*, Xiao Huang, Raymond J. Delnicki and Jean-Pierre Saint-Jeannet^¶

Department of Animal Biology, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, 3800 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.

^¶ Author for correspondence (e-mail: saintj{at}vet.upenn.edu)

Accepted 1 August 2006

Among the families of transcription factors expressed at the neural plate border, Sox proteins have been shown to regulate multiple aspects of neural crest development. Sox8, Sox9 and Sox10, exhibit overlapping expression domains in neural crest progenitors, and studies in mouse suggest that Sox8 functions redundantly with Sox9 and Sox10 during neural crest development. Here, we show that in Xenopus, Sox8 accumulates at the lateral edges of the neural plate at the mid-gastrula stage; in contrast to its mouse and chick orthologs, Sox8 expression precedes that of Sox9 and Sox10 in neural crest progenitors. Later in development, Sox8 expression persists in migrating cranial crest cells as they populate the pharyngeal arches and in trunk neural crest cells, in a pattern that recapitulates both Sox9 and Sox10 expression domains. Although morpholino-mediated knockdown of Sox8 protein did not prevent the formation of neural crest progenitors, the timing of their induction was severely affected. This delay in neural crest specification had dramatic consequences on the development of multiple lineages of the neural crest. We demonstrate that these defects are due to the inability of neural crest cells to migrate into the periphery, rather than to a deficiency in neural crest progenitors specification and survival. These results indicate that the control of Sox8 expression at the neural plate border is a key process in initiating neural crest formation in Xenopus, and highlight species-specific differences in the relative importance of SoxE proteins during neural crest development.

Key words: Neural crest, Induction, Sox9, Sox10, Craniofacial, Melanocytes, Xenopus

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