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Updated: Aug 30, 2026

Tissue Determination Using the Animal Cap Transplant (ACT) Assay in Xenopus laevis
Published on: May 16, 2010
The Xenopus noggin promoter drives roof-plate specific transcription
Xin Geng1, Lei Xiao, Qinghua Tao
1Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 320 Yue-yang Road, Shanghai 200031, PR China.
Abstract:
During vertebrate neural development, inductive signals derived from the roof plate specify dorsal neural cell types of spinal cord as well as adjacent dermomytotome. Noggin has been demonstrated to play a pivotal role in this signaling network but how its expression is regulated remains unclear. To investigate this issue, we identified a 2066 bp Xenopus noggin 5' flanking sequence which recapitulates the roof-plate expression of endogenous gene in transgenic frog tadpoles and we further mapped the roof-plate enhancer to a sequence as short as 79 bp. Our results, therefore, not only shed light on but also provide a powerful tool to the study of neural and somite patterning.
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