Cellular Recognition during Neural Development

作者：David I. Gottlieb, L Glaser · 发表于：Annual Review of Neuroscience · 年份：1980 · DOI：10.1146/annurev.ne.03.030180.001511 · 被引用次数：64 · 研究领域：Axon Guidance and Neuronal Signaling、Photoreceptor and optogenetics research、Origins and Evolution of Life

Roger Sperry's chemoaffinity hypothesis, elegantly summarized in the pre­ ceding quotation (Sperry 1965), is one of the central ideas of contemporary neurobiology. When Sperry first proposed the chemoaffinity hypothesis, the experimental evidence for it consisted entirely of behavioral and anatomical studies. The proposed identification tags were necessary to explain the way axons grow during the regeneration of altered nervous pathways; the hy­ pot hesis gained widespread support because it was extremely difficult to imagine other reasonable explanations for the anatomical and behavioral results. Experimental support for the chemoaffinity hypothesis could theoreti­ cally be of two distinct kinds. In the first, the nervous system is altered and the assembly of nerve circuits is observed and compared to that in normal animals. If chemical identification tags offer a parsimonious explanation for the observed patterns of growth and connections, then the theory gains support. More direct support must come from experiments of a second kind, which study actual molecular content, in order to test the proposition