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Developmental neurobiology

Unscrambling a disabled brain

Nature volume 389, pages 668–669 (1997)Cite this article

The orderly development of neurons in the mammalian brain is a conundrum that defies imagination: the billions of neurons that are generated around the cerebral ventricles must migrate through the tissue to find their destination, before forming exquisite cell patterns. The formation of these patterns is abnormal in mice with the reeler phenotype, showing that it is controlled by the reeler, scrambler and, probably, several other genes.

Although the mechanisms by which pattern formation is regulated remain largely unknown, the gene that is mutated in reeler mice — reelin — was cloned in 19951. Reelin is an extracellular-matrix glycoprotein that is secreted by a few embryonic brain neurons, such as Cajal-Retzius cells in the marginal zone of the cerebral cortex2. Yet most of the neurons that show the reeler phenotype do not express the reelin messenger RNA and protein3,4, suggesting that Reelin acts at a distance in a juxtacrine fashion on target cells, radial glial cells and/or neurons.

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Figure 1: Model of Reelin action on developing cortex, based on the findings of Sheldon et al.5

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  1. the Département de Physiologie Humaine, Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, 61 rue de Bruxelles, Namur, B-5000, Belgium

    André M. Goffinet

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  1. André M. Goffinet
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Goffinet, A. Unscrambling a disabled brain. Nature 389, 668–669 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/39453

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