| First Author | Hägglund AC | Year | 2013 |
| Journal | PLoS One | Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 12 | Pages | e81158 |
| PubMed ID | 24324671 | Mgi Jnum | J:210692 |
| Mgi Id | MGI:5571670 | Doi | 10.1371/journal.pone.0081158 |
| Citation | Hagglund AC, et al. (2013) Canonical Wnt/beta-catenin signalling is essential for optic cup formation. PLoS One 8(12):e81158 |
| abstractText | A multitude of signalling pathways are involved in the process of forming an eye. Here we demonstrate that beta-catenin is essential for eye development as inactivation of beta-catenin prior to cellular specification in the optic vesicle caused anophthalmia in mice. By achieving this early and tissue-specific beta-catenin inactivation we find that retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) commitment was blocked and eye development was arrested prior to optic cup formation due to a loss of canonical Wnt signalling in the dorsal optic vesicle. Thus, these results show that Wnt/beta-catenin signalling is required earlier and play a more central role in eye development than previous studies have indicated. In our genetic model system a few RPE cells could escape beta-catenin inactivation leading to the formation of a small optic rudiment. The optic rudiment contained several neural retinal cell classes surrounded by an RPE. Unlike the RPE cells, the neural retinal cells could be beta-catenin-negative revealing that differentiation of the neural retinal cell classes is beta-catenin-independent. Moreover, although dorsoventral patterning is initiated in the mutant optic vesicle, the neural retinal cells in the optic rudiment displayed almost exclusively ventral identity. Thus, beta-catenin is required for optic cup formation, commitment to RPE cells and maintenance of dorsal identity of the retina. |
