Assessing signaling properties of ectodermal epithelia during craniofacial development

The accessibility of avian embryos has helped experimental embryologists understand the fates of cells during development and the role of tissue interactions that regulate patterning and morphogenesis of vertebrates (e.g., (1, 2, 3, 4)). Here, we illustrate a method that exploits this accessibility to test the signaling and patterning properties of ectodermal tissues during facial development. In these experiments, we create quail-chick (5) or mouse-chick (6) chimeras by transplanting the surface cephalic ectoderm that covers the upper jaw from quail or mouse onto either the same region or an ectopic region of chick embryos. The use of quail as donor tissue for transplantation into chicks was developed to take advantage of a nucleolar marker present in quail but not chick cells, thus allowing investigators to distinguish host and donor tissues (7). Similarly, a repetitive element is present in the mouse genome and is expressed ubiquitously, which allows us to distinguish host and donor tissues in mouse-chick chimeras (8). The use of mouse ectoderm as donor tissue will greatly extend our understanding of these tissue interactions, because this will allow us to test the signaling properties of ectoderm derived from various mutant embryos.