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A Transient Role for Ciliary Neurotrophic Factor in Chick Photoreceptor Development by Sabine Fuhrmann; Stefan Heller; Hermann Rohrer; Hans-Dieter Hofmann is a Neuroscience article available to read on EtoBox.

What is A Transient Role for Ciliary Neurotrophic Factor in Chick Photoreceptor Development about?

Previous studies suggest that ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF) may represent one of the extrinsic signals controlling the development of vertebrate retinal photoreceptors. In dissociated cultures from embryonic chick retina, exogenously applied CNTF has been shown to act on postmitotic rod precursor cells, resulting in an two-to fourfold increase in the number of cells acquiring an opsin-positive phenotype. We now demonstrate that the responsiveness of photoreceptor precursors to CNTF is confined to a brief phase between their final mitosis and their terminal differentiation owing to the temporally restricted expression of the CNTF receptor (CNTFR␣). As shown immunocytochemically, CNTFR␣ expression in the presumptive photoreceptor layer of the chick retina starts at embryonic day 8 (E8) and is rapidly down-regulated a few days later prior to the differentiation of opsin-positive photo-receptors, both in vivo and in dissociated cultures from E8. We further show that the CNTF-dependent in vitro differentiation of rods is followed by a phase of photoreceptor-specific apoptotic cell death. The loss of differentiated rods during this apoptotic phase can be prevented by micromolar conc

Who reads A Transient Role for Ciliary Neurotrophic Factor in Chick Photoreceptor Development?

Author

Sabine Fuhrmann; Stefan Heller; Hermann Rohrer; Hans-Dieter Hofmann

Publisher

John Wiley and Sons; Wiley (John Wiley & Sons); John Wiley & Sons Inc.; Wiley (ISSN 0022-3034)

Published

1998

Language

EN

Field

Neuroscience (Life Sciences)