Clonal restriction boundaries in Xenopus embryos shown with two intracellular lineage tracers.
It has been proposed that clonal restriction boundaries develop in Xenopus embryos between clones initiated at the 512-cell stage, and that these boundaries result in formation of morphological compartments, each populated by progeny of a group of ancestral cells. Although this hypothesis has gained some acceptance, it has also been criticized because the use of only one cell lineage tracer was not a conclusive test of the hypothesis. However, the critical experiment, an assessment of the extent of mingling between two labeled clones in the same embryo, has now been performed. A model of the proposed arrangement of the ancestral cell groups in the 512-cell embryo predicted that the two clones would remain separate in 49% of cases and intermingle in 51% of cases. In fact, there was a bimodal distribution, in which separation of the clones occurred in 46% of embryos and extensive interclonal mingling was observed in 54%. These results are not compatible with hypotheses in which a unimodal distribution of mingling would be predicted but are consistent with the compartment hypothesis.
D000818:Animals; D002490:Central Nervous System / Q000196:embryology; D002999:Clone Cells; D004625:Embryo, Nonmammalian / Q000166:cytology / Q000502:physiology*; D005314:Embryonic and Fetal Development; D005456:Fluorescent Dyes; D008856:Microscopy, Fluorescence; D008954:Models, Biological; D014981:Xenopus
D005456:Fluorescent Dyes