PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Andrea Attardi
AU  - Timothy Fulton
AU  - Maria Florescu
AU  - Gopi Shah
AU  - Leila Muresan
AU  - Jan Huisken
AU  - Alexander van Oudenaarden
AU  - Benjamin Steventon
TI  - Neuromesodermal Progenitors are a Conserved Source of Spinal Cord with Divergent Growth Dynamics
AID  - 10.1101/304543
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 304543
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/04/19/304543.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/04/19/304543.full
AB  - During gastrulation, embryonic cells become specified into distinct germ layers. In mouse, this continues throughout somitogenesis from a population of bipotent stem cells called neuromesodermal progenitors (NMps). However, the degree self-renewal is associated with NMps in the fast-developing zebrafish embryo is unclear. With a genetic clone tracing method, we labelled early embryonic progenitors and find a strong clonal similarity between spinal cord and mesoderm tissues. We then followed individual cell lineages by light-sheet imaging and reveal a common neuromesodermal lineage contribution to a subset of spinal cord tissue across the anterior-posterior body axis. An initial population subdivides at mid gastrula stages and is directly allocated to neural and mesodermal compartments during gastrulation. A second population in the tailbud undergoes delayed allocation to contribute to the neural and mesodermal compartment only at late somitogenesis. We suggest that NMps undergo vastly different rates of differentiation and growth in a species-specific manner.