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Volume 17, Number 20, Issue of October 15, 1997 pp. 7796-7804
Copyright ©1997 Society for Neuroscience

Pathfinding by Identified Zebrafish Motoneurons in the Absence of Muscle Pioneers

Received March 24, 1997; revised July 28, 1997; accepted July 30, 1997.

Ellie Melançon¹, Dennis W. C. Liu², Monte Westerfield¹, and Judith S. Eisen¹

¹ Institute of Neuroscience, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403-1254, and ² Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, Maryland 20815-6789

To identify the cellular cues that guide zebrafish neuronal growth cones to their targets, we examined interactions between identified motor growth cones and identified muscle fibers and tested whether these fibers were required for growth cone navigation. Caudal primary motoneurons (CaPs) and middle primary motoneurons (MiPs) are identified motoneurons that innervate cell-specific regions of the myotome. Growth cones of both cells initially extend along a common pathway and then pause at a set of identified muscle fibers, called muscle pioneers, before diverging along cell-specific pathways. Muscle pioneers are intermediate targets of both CaP and MiP (; ); both motoneurons extend their growth cones directly to the muscle pioneers on which the first functional neuromuscular contacts form, suggesting that muscle pioneers may provide guidance information to these growth cones. We tested this idea by ablating muscle pioneers and observing the resulting motor axonal trajectories. Both CaP and MiP ultimately formed normal axonal arbors after muscle pioneer ablation, showing that muscle pioneers are unnecessary for formation of correct axonal trajectories; however, although final cellular morphology was correct in the absence of muscle pioneers, MiP growth cones branched abnormally or extended ventrally beyond the common pathway. Ablation of CaP and the muscle pioneers together increased the aberrant behavior of the MiP growth cone. Our results provide evidence that an intermediate target, the muscle pioneers, affects motor axonal extension without altering target choice, suggesting that other cues also contribute to proper pathway navigation.

Key words: acetylcholine receptors; neuromuscular junctions; axogenesis; zebrafish motoneurons; muscle pioneers; pathway navigation

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