Development of the laminated pattern of the chick tectum opticum

Several ontogenetic studies have been devoted to the structural organization of the developing tectum opticum. They disagree in many respects because they are based on histological preparations performed with differently oriented planes of section. According to our results the differences found in the literature mainly result from the fact that the developmental gradient axis undergoes remarkable positional changes with respect to both optic lobe and neural tube longitudinal anatomical axes during the early stages of development. The present work is a dynamic description of the tectum opticum lamination based on sections coinciding with the developmental gradient. Since this latter displays a curved disposition, several slightly modified planes of section had to be used to obtain a complete picture along the developmental gradient. The development of the tectal architecture proceeds from a relatively simple organization through increasingly complex multilaminated patterns. A dynamic interpretation of successive images of a particular region observed at increasing developmental stages or of images observed at a particular stage along the entire length of the developmental gradient axis, allows us to propose that embryonic laminae are only transient spatial arrangements of cells actively migrating from the sites where they were generated to those where they will definitively reside. These considerations led us to define a nomenclature that establishes clear correlations between the early transient organizations and the definitive one of the fully developed optic tectum. This type of nomenclature could be usefully applied to describe dynamically the development of structures displaying multilaminated patterns such as other cortical zones of the central nervous system.