Telencephalic progenitors maintain anteroposterior identities cell autonomously

Grafting experiments have demonstrated that determination of anteroposterior (AP) identity is an early step in neural patterning that precedes dorsoventral (DV) specification. These studies used pieces of tissue, however, rather than individual cells to address this question. It thus remains unclear whether the maintenance of AP identity is a cell-autonomous property or a result of signaling between cells within the grafted tissue. Previously, we and others have used transplants of dissociated brain cells to show that individual telencephalic precursor cells can adopt host-specific DV identities when they integrate within novel regions of the telencephalon. We have now undertaken a set of transplantations during the same mid-neurogenic period used in the previous studies to assess the ability of telencephalic progenitors to integrate and differentiate into more posterior regions of the neuraxis. We observed that telencephalic progenitors were capable of integrating and migrating within different AP levels of the central nervous system (CNS). Despite this, we found that telencephalic progenitors that integrated within the diencephalon and the mesencephalon continued to express a telencephalic marker until adulthood. We speculate that during neurogenesis individual progenitors are determined in terms of their AP but not their DV identity. Hence, AP identity is maintained cell autonomously within individual progenitors.