Zebrafish wnt11: pattern and regulation of the expression by the yolk cell and No tail activity

This study analyzed the spatial and temporal expression pattern of zebrafish wnt11 and the regulation of the expression during zebrafish early development, focusing on the interaction with the no tail (ntl) gene, a zebrafish orthologue of mouse Brachyury (T). Zygotic expression of wnt11 was first detected at the late blastula stage in the blastoderm margin, a presumptive mesoderm region. wnt11 expression coincided with mesoderm induction, and the expression was induced by mesoderm inducers such as the yolk cell (Mizuno, T., Yamaha, E., Wakahara, M., Kuroiwa, A., Takeda, H., 1996. Mesoderm induction in zebrafish. Nature 383, 131-132) or FGFs, indicating that, like ntl, wnt11 is one of the immediate-early genes in mesoderm induction. Initial expression domains of wnt11 and ntl overlapped, and these genes showed a similar response to mesoderm inducers. However, analysis of the ntl mutant embryos suggested that wnt11 and ntl are placed in distinct genetic pathways; the ntl mutation had no effect on wnt11 expression in the blastoderm margin. This was further supported by the result of RNA injection experiments showing that overexpression of Wnt11 did not affect ntl expression in the margin. Thus, wnt11 and ntl expression are induced and maintained independently in their initial phase of expression. In later stages, wnt11 was expressed in various organs, such as the somites, particularly in the developing notochord. Since no wnt gene has been reported to be expressed in the axial mesoderm, which is known to act as a signaling source that patterns the neural tube and somites, zebrafish wnt11 is the first wnt gene expressed in the notochord. Furthermore, in contrast to early expression, wnt11 expression in the notochord depended on Ntl activity. In the ntl mutant in which somite patterning is severely affected, wnt11 expression was completely lost, while another signaling molecule, sonic hedgehog is expressed in the mutant notochord precursor cells (Krauss, S., Concordet, J.-P., Ingham, P.W., 1993. A functionally conserved homolog of the Drosophila segment polarity gene hh is expressed in tissues with polarizing activity in zebrafish embryos. Cell 75, 1431-1444). wnt11 expression in the somite also shows a characteristic pattern, correlated with the migration and differentiation of slow muscle precursors. These observations suggest a role for wnt11 in patterning the somites.