| Budget Amount *help |
¥5,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥4,000,000、Indirect Cost: ¥1,200,000)
Fiscal Year 2017: ¥1,560,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,200,000、Indirect Cost: ¥360,000)
Fiscal Year 2016: ¥1,560,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,200,000、Indirect Cost: ¥360,000)
Fiscal Year 2015: ¥2,080,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,600,000、Indirect Cost: ¥480,000)
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| Outline of Final Research Achievements |
Marsupial neonates are immature at birth, compared to placentals. Since they must suckle on mother’s milk, their jaws develop early. Yet, underlying mechanisms regulating this temporal shift of developmental program is unknown. We have previously found that Sox9 expression is turned on early in the cranial neural crest of opossum embryos, compared to mouse ones, and that marsupial-specific sequence alteration in the neural crest enhancer of Sox9 is responsible, at least in part, for this temporal shift. In this study using quail embryos, we have found that Myb transcription factor, a neural-border specifier, activates the enhancer, while Wnt signaling, a neural crest inducer, does not. Aiming to perform similar experiments in opossum embryos/cells, our attempts of culturing opossum embryos, making iPS cells, or direct-reprograming of fibroblasts into neural crest cells all failed. Thus, technical improvements of these methods seem to be essential for future studies.
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