Neuron migration within the radial glial fiber system of the developing murine cerebrum: an electron microscopic autoradiographic analysis

Abstract

The present analysis provides direct evidence in the mouse that in the course of course of neocortical histogenesis, contact between migrating neurons and the surfaces of radial glial fibers is both invariant and relatively selective. The analysis characterizes in detail the migratory behavior of the individual migrating cell with respect to the overall radial glial fiber system as this system varies systematically in its structure with ascent through the strata of the cerebral wall. A quantitative study of the relationships between the radial glial fibers confidently identified by their glycogen content and the migrating neurons marked autoradiographically by injection of [3H]thymidine was also performed at the ultrastructural level on tangential sections at different pallial levels in E16 and E17 embryos. The overall set of observations lend support to the hypothesis that radial glial fibers act specifically as guides to neuronal migration and illustrate the nature of the cell-to-cell interaction which serves this cellular process critical to neocortical histogenesis.