Glia relay differentiation cues to coordinate neuronal development in Drosophila
Vilaiwan M. Fernandes*,†, Zhenqing Chen†,‡, Anthony M. Rossi, Jaqueline Zipfel§, Claude Desplan
Department of Biology, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003, USA.
↵*Corresponding author. Email: vilaiwan@nyu.edu
↵† These authors contributed equally to this work.
↵‡ Present address: Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
↵§ Present address: Institut für Neuro- und Verhaltensbiologie, Badestraße 9, 48149 Münster, Germany.
Science 01 Sep 2017:Vol. 357, Issue 6354, pp. 886-891
Abstract
Neuronal birth and specification must be coordinated across the developing brain to generate the neurons that constitute neural circuits. We used the Drosophila visual system to investigate how development is coordinated to establish retinotopy, a feature of all visual systems. Photoreceptors achieve retinotopy by inducing their target field in the optic lobe, the lamina neurons, with a secreted differentiation cue, epidermal growth factor (EGF). We find that communication between photoreceptors and lamina cells requires a signaling relay through glia. In response to photoreceptor-EGF, glia produce insulin-like peptides, which induce lamina neuronal differentiation. Our study identifies a role for glia in coordinating neuronal development across distinct brain regions, thus reconciling the timing of column assembly with that of delayed differentiation, as well as the spatiotemporal pattern of lamina neuron differentiation.
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