Clonal Analysis in the Chicken Retina Reveals Tangential Dispersion of Clonally Related Cells

Retinal progenitor cells can produce restricted subsets of horizontal cells

“…Furthermore, embryonic injections of the same virus produced clones composed of many retinal cell types, with most clones, again even those with only two cells, containing two or more cell types (12). The multipotency of retinal progenitor cells was also shown by lineage analyses in the avian retina and Xenopus retina (13)(14)(15). All of the lineage data, along with data from mixing experiments in which progenitor cells from different ages were challenged with different environments, led to the proposal that retinal multipotent progenitor cells exhibit temporal differences in their competency to make the different retinal cell types (16).…”

Notch activity permits retinal cells to progress through multiple progenitor states and acquire a stem cell property

“…Large, retrovirally marked clones in the murine or chick retina contain cell types that are born exclusively early and exclusively late in development, e.g., ganglion and Müller glia cells (31,32). Such clones can arise only if an initially infected progenitor cell makes a postmitotic daughter(s) early and a progenitor daughter(s) that progresses to a late state of competence.…”

Somatic transgenesis using retroviral vectors in the chicken embryo

“…CHAP virus is a derivative of Rdlac1 virus replacing ␤-gal with the human placental alkaline phosphatase. These two viruses can be produced by the transient transfection of the packaging cell line Q2bn (Stoker and Bissell, 1988;Ryder and Cepko, 1994;Fekete et al, 1994) at a titer as high as 4 ϫ 10 5 virions/ml. The titer can be further concentrated to ranging from 6 ϫ 10 5 to 8 ϫ 10 6 virions/ml .…”

“…RDlac1 virus (and presumably CHAP virus) can infect early chick blastoderm (Reddy et al, 1991). Coinjection of RDlac1 and CHAP (or CHAPOL; see below) viruses has been used to assess clonal boundaries in lineage analysis in the cerebellum , retina (Fekete et al, 1994), and inner ear (Fekete et al, 1998;Lang and Fekete, 2001). …”

“…BBAN viral stocks can also be obtained by transient transfection of Q2bn cell line, although this method is prone to production of helper virus . BBAN virus has been used for lineage analysis of the chick cerebellum and retina (Fekete et al, 1994): an antibody against a core protein of the virus can be used to identify infected cells. BBAN␤gal virus is a derivative of BBAN and encodes a ␤-gal (Boerkoel et al, 1993).…”