Developmental neurogenesis articles from across Nature Portfolio

Challenging the belief that sympathetic ganglia are an innovation of jawed vertebrates, a study reports the presence of sympathetic neurons in an extant jawless vertebrate, the sea lamprey Petromyzon marinus.

In Zebrafish embryos spinal cords, neural precursors are clustered in two distinct populations based on their spindle-microtubule enrichment. KIF16Ba, CAMSAP2a/3a and spindle-microtubule enrichment control Sara endosome motility and mediate neural precursor fates.

Coquand, Brunet Avalos et al. develop an imaging method to map basal radial glial cell division in human fetal tissue and cerebral organoids and detect abundant symmetric amplifying, but also direct neurogenic divisions bypassing intermediate progenitors.

A basket-like device records the electrical activity of neural organoids over months of maturation.

The modern human variant of the gene transketolase-like 1, but not the Neanderthal variant, promotes the production of basal radial glia during neocortical development.

Multiple methods for deriving human cortical organoids have been established in the past decade. A study now systematically compares patterning strategies and shows that combined WNT and dual SMAD inhibition is superior to dual SMAD inhibition alone in inducing robust cortical identity in 3D human pluripotent stem-cell aggregates.

Two new studies of mutations linked to distinct neurological conditions — autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) — use human brain organoids to identify mutation-driven alterations to cell lineage trajectories during early brain development.

Lancaster and colleagues describe a morphological change in early primate brain stem cells, the timing of which could underlie the differences in brain size between human and apes.

A new study proposes an exciting new model of neuronal diversification in the developing enteric nervous system (ENS) and establishes a detailed molecular taxonomy for enteric neurons. Their findings open new horizons for ENS research and for developing cell-based therapies for ENS disorders.