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Hanging by the tail: progenitor populations proliferate

Nature Neuroscience volume 14, pages 538–540 (2011)Cite this article

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A study now identifies a new progenitor subtype in the developing mouse cortex, similar to the outer radial glia progenitors described previously in human, ferret and other mammals with larger, folded brains.

The general readership might ask why this topic is so newsworthy. The answer lies in the widespread implications that understanding of cortical progenitor populations has for stem cell biology, cortical neurogenesis, evolutionary biology and comparative biology—leading toward the 'holy grail' that is the comprehension of the expansion of the mammalian cerebral cortex7. The Wang et al. paper5 together with the Shitamukai et al.4 publication are landmarks because they link the previously identified OSVZ progenitors in the human and ferret to these oRG progenitors in the mouse, thereby not only providing a highly accessible model organism for which detailed quantitative cell biological analyses are available, but also reinforcing the concept of a uniform developmental mechanism for all mammals.

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Figure 1: Comparisons of mouse and human cortical germinal zones.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Navneet A. Vasistha and Fernando Garcia-Moreno are in the Department of Physiology, Zoltán Molnár, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.,

    Zoltán Molnár, Navneet A Vasistha & Fernando Garcia-Moreno

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  1. Zoltán Molnár
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  2. Navneet A Vasistha
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  3. Fernando Garcia-Moreno
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Correspondence to Zoltán Molnár.

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Molnár, Z., Vasistha, N. & Garcia-Moreno, F. Hanging by the tail: progenitor populations proliferate. Nat Neurosci 14, 538–540 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2817

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