Critical roles of ARHGAP36 as a signal transduction mediator of Shh pathway in lateral motor columnar specification
- Seoul National University, Korea (South), Republic of
- Inje University, Korea (South), Republic of
- Oregon Health and Science University, United States
Abstract
During spinal cord development, Sonic hedgehog (Shh), secreted from the floor plate, plays an important role in the production of motor neurons by patterning the ventral neural tube, which establishes MN progenitor identity. It remains unknown, however, if Shh signaling plays a role in generating columnar diversity of MNs that connect distinct target muscles. Here, we report that Shh, expressed in MNs, is essential for the formation of lateral motor column (LMC) neurons in vertebrate spinal cord. This novel activity of Shh is mediated by its downstream effector ARHGAP36, whose expression is directly induced by the MN-specific transcription factor complex Isl1-Lhx3. Furthermore, we found that AKT stimulates the Shh activity to induce LMC MNs through the stabilization of ARHGAP36 proteins. Taken together, our data reveal that Shh, secreted from MNs, plays a crucial role in generating MN diversity via a regulatory axis of Shh-AKT-ARHGAP36 in the developing mouse spinal cord.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
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STAT3 promotes motor neuron differentiation by collaborating with motor neuron-specific LIM complexNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE50993.
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Synergistic binding of transcription factors to cell-specific enhancers programs motor neuron identity.NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE31456.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Korea Health Industry Development Institute (HI17C0447)
- Seunghee Lee
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R01NS100471)
- Soo-Kyung Lee
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All mouse works were performed under an approved protocol (SNU-150123-1-2) by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) at Seoul National University.
Copyright
© 2019, Nam et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Critical roles of ARHGAP36 as a signal transduction mediator of Shh pathway in lateral motor columnar specification
eLife 8:e46683.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.46683
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