Development and organization of glial cells in Drosophila melanogaster

Glial cells constitute a crucial component of the nervous system. They wrap the neuronal somata and axons and play a number of roles during normal neuronal development and activity as well as during axonal regeneration after wounding. The availability of cellular markers and genetic tools have made it possible in Drosophila to start identifying the genes and the cell-cell interactions leading to glial cell differentiation. The existence of multipotent precursor cells in the nervous system, the requirement for master genes determining the glial cell fate, the migratory abilities of fly glial cells and the existence of neuron-glial cell interactions during development are some of the features revealed by these approaches. These findings also indicate an evolutionary conservation in the developmental mechanisms between invertebrates and vertebrates. Finally, Drosophila is an ideal model system to determine in vivo the precise roles of glial cells and to study the etiology of pathologies associated with abnormal glial differentiation.