A second career for a growth factor receptor: keeping nerve axons...( LA JOLLA CA Neurons constituting th...)

LA JOLLA, CA Neurons constituting the optic nerve wire up to the brain in a highly dynamic way. Cell bodies in the developing retina sprout processes, called axons, which extend toward visual centers in the brain, lured by attractive cues and making U-turns when they take the wrong path. How they find targets so accurately is a central question of neuroscience today.

Using the mouse visual system, a team of Salk Institute for Biological Studies investigators led by Dennis O'Leary, Ph.D., identified an unanticipated factor that helps keep retinal axons from going astray. They report in the Sept. 11 issue of Neuron that p75, a protein previously known to regulate whether neurons live or die, leads a double life as an axon guidance protein.

"Historically, we thought that factors that mediate cell survival and those controlling axon guidance were part of two separate processes," says O'Leary, a professor in the Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory, "But in this study we show a direct interaction between these two systems."

Collaborating with Kuo-Fen Lee, Ph.D., professor in the Clayton Foundation Laboratories for Peptide Biology, the O'Leary team observed a defect in mice genetically engineered to lack p75. Through their synaptic connections, retinal axons develop a two-dimensional map of the retina in their targets in the brain. In the mice lacking p75, retinal axons stopped short of their final target and formed a map that was shifted forward to the superior colliculus, a major visual center in the brain.

Such a defect in p75-null mice was puzzling: researchers have studied p75 for decades and found it associated with activities as varied as neuronal growth, survival, and degeneration. Axonal migration was not among them.

Todd McLaughlin, Ph.D., a senior research associate in the lab and co-first author, says that insight came in a eureka moment: "We realized that what we were observing in these mice was s
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