Evo-engineering and the Cellular and Molecular Origins of the Vertebrate Spinal Cord

The formation of the spinal cord during early embryonic development in vertebrate embryos is a continuous process that begins at gastrulation and continues through to the completion of somitogenesis. Despite the conserved usage of patterning mechanisms and gene regulatory networks that act to generate specify spinal cord progenitors, there now exists two seemingly disparate models to account for their action. In the first, a posterior localized signalling source transforms previously anterior-specified neural plate into the spinal cord. In the second, a population of bipotent stem cells undergo continuous self-renewal and differentiation to progressively lay down the spinal cord and axial me