Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-23-2021

Comments

This article is the authors’ final published version in Journal of Neuroscience, Volume 41, Issue 25, June 2021, Pages 5331 - 5337.

The published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0340-21.202 . Copyright © Iacovitti

Abstract

In 1981, I published a paper in the first issue of The Journal of Neuroscience with my postdoctoral mentor, Richard Bunge. At that time, the long-standing belief that each neuron expressed only one neurotransmitter, known as Dale's Principle (Dale, 1935), was being hotly debated following a report by French embryologist Nicole Le Douarin showing that neural crest cells destined for one transmitter phenotype could express characteristics of another if transplanted to alternate sites in the developing embryo (Le Douarin, 1980). In the Bunge laboratory, we were able to more directly test the question of phenotypic plasticity in the controlled environment of the tissue culture dish. Thus, in our paper, we grew autonomic catecholaminergic neurons in culture under conditions which promoted the acquisition of cholinergic traits and showed that cells did not abandon their inherited phenotype to adopt a new one but instead were capable of dual transmitter expression. In this Progressions article, I detail the path that led to these findings and how this study impacted the direction I followed for the next 40 years. This is my journey from phenotypic plasticity to the promise of a stem cell therapy.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

PubMed ID

33958488

Language

English

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