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Control of the microtubule stability in the growing axons is essential for proper axon guidance
(2009.09.16)
During development, axons extend from neurons find the correct path to their targets to form synapses through the perception of extracellular gguidance cuesh. Although it is thought that these axon guidance cues are presumed to determine the dynamics of the cytoskeleton within axons, the details of the molecular mechanism governing cytoskeletal organization have not been fully elucidated. The research group of Masaharu Noda and Takafumi Shintani of Division of Molecular Neurobiology at the National Institute for Basic Biology has discovered that Adenomatous polyposis coli 2 (APC2) is involved in determining the axonal response to guidance cues by controlling the microtubule stability. Thus, we have gained important knowledge of the microtubule control mechanism in the formation of correct neural circuits. The details of this research were published in The Journal of Neuroscience, the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, on the 16th of September, 2009 (Link).