infocus #7 September 2007 Hedgehogs, fluorescence imaging and brain development

How does an animal develop from a single cell, the fertilized egg, into a highly organised adult body in all its complexity?

DOI: 10.22443/rms.inf.1.25

Since the 19th Century, this question has preoccupied developmental biologists such as Karl Ernst von Baer, Ernst Häckel and Gavin de Beer. The formation of cellular compartments and their maintenance by boundaries that emit morphogenetic signals responsible for organising local development has long been recognised as a key feature of insect development. In the early 1990s, Andrew Lumsden was the first to show the existence of such compartments in vertebrates, specifically in the hindbrain region (Lumsden and Keynes, 1989). In 2004, I was fortunate to join his laboratory in the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology at King’s College London. Recently, he showed that one of the prominent structural boundaries in the embryonic forebrain, the Zona Limitans Intrathalamica (ZLI), which bisects the forebrain transversely, is not a simple boundary but also an individual compartment in its own right – the only compartment so far detected in the forebrain (Zeltser et al., 2001). Following this observation, we started to elucidate the mechanism leading to the formation of the ZLI and unravelled specific organising functions for this structure: it turns out that the ZLI is crucial for the development of the thalamus – the major relay station between the brain and the outside world.

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Author

Steffen Scholpp

MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology

Steffen Scholpp received his Ph.D. with summa cum laude in 2003 at the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, where he discovered the mechanism leading to the boundary formation between forebrain and midbrain. As a research associate, he moved to the Max-Planck Institute for Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany, where he elucidated traffi cking of signaling molecules in vivo and their direct involvement on the development of embryos. Since 2004, he has been an independent research fellow in Prof Andrew Lumsden’s group in the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology at KCL. His research interests are in the function of local signalling organisers and boundary formation in the vertebrate brain, especially the ZLI organiser and its infl uence on the development of the thalamus. For his research, he was awarded by the German Society of Developmental Biology (GfE; Ph.D. thesis) and by the EMBO Society (Longterm Research Fellowship). He is member of the EU Research Network ‘Forebrain patterning’.