Neural induction: New achievements and prospects

Neural induction is a triggering of neural differentiation in a portion of cells of the vertebrate embryonic ectoderm in response to signals emanating from adjacent tissues. As revealed more than ten years ago in experiments with Xenopus embryos, the major role in neural induction is played by suppression of the bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) signaling cascade in neural cell precursors. Consequently, the epidermal differentiation program is blocked and a neural program is activated in such cells by default. The so-called default model of neural induction was supported with other experimental subjects. An important role in neural induction is also played by the FGF and Wnt signaling cascades via their interactions with the BMP cascade. As new regulatory proteins involved in neural induction were identified and their properties analyzed in detail, it became possible to apply mathematical modeling to study, with the example of neural induction, the spatial self-organization of cell differentiation in the embryo as one of the main problems of developmental biology.