Authors: Hsin Chien Tizeta Tadesse Huijie Liu Manfred Schmidt W William Walthall Phang C Tai Charles D Derby
Publish Date: 2009/03/26
Volume: 39, Issue: 1-2, Pages: 294-
Abstract
The olfactory organ of the Caribbean spiny lobster Panulirus argus maintains lifelong proliferation and turnover of olfactory receptor neurons ORNs Towards examining the molecular basis of this adult neurogenesis we search for expression of homologs of proneural neurogenic and prepattern genes in this olfactory organ We report here a homolog of the proneural Achaete–Scute family called splash spiny lobster achaete–scute homolog and a homolog of the prepattern and neurogenic hairy–enhancer of split family called splhairy spiny lobster hairy Semiquantitative reverse transcriptase–polymerase chain reaction RTPCR indicates a molt stage dependence of the levels of expression of splash and splhairy mRNA in the olfactory organ with higher expression in premolt than in postmolt or intermolt animals which is positively correlated with rates of neurogenesis splash and splhairy mRNA are expressed not only in the olfactory organ but also in other tissues albeit at lower levels irrespective of molt stage We conclude that the expression of achaete–scute and hairy–enhancer of split in the proliferation zone of the olfactory organ of spiny lobsters and their enhanced expression in premolt animals suggest that they play a role in the proliferation of ORNs and that their expression in regions of the olfactory organ populated by mature ORNs and in other tissues suggests that they have additional functionsWe thank the staff of the Keys Marine Laboratory wwwkeysmarinelaborg for supplying spiny lobsters and Dr Timothy McClintock for many helpful discussions advice and assistance This work was supported by NIH grant DC00312 and the Georgia Research Alliance
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