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Biology of the Nerve Growth Cone: edited by Stanley Kater and Paul Letourneau, Alan R. Liss, 1985.£34.00 (xx + 351 pages) ISBN 0 8451 0242 7
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Gordon-Weeks, Phillip R. |
| Copyright Year | 1986 |
| Abstract | Growth cones are the highly motile tips of growing axons and dendrites. They have held our attention ever since Ram6n y Cajal first saw one in the central nervous system of the developing chick and guessed, with characteristic accuracy, at their purpose. That was nearly one hundred years ago and we still have no definitive description of how growth cones move about or how axons and dendrites elongate. Perhaps even further from our grasp is a molecular description of the recognition events involved in synapse formation. Because the growth cone is responsible not only for navigating the axon or dendrite to its destination bet also for recognizing the correct synaptic partner, growth cones are crucial in the development and regeneration of the nervous system. For those interested in these areas this book is essential reading. As the editors point out in their preface, which serves as a potted history of the field, there has been a resurgence of late in growth cone research after a lull of 20 years or so since the heydays of Harrison (who invented tissue culture to study them) and Speidel. They attribute this renascence to the introduction of new and powerful techniques such as time lapse cinematography coupled with high contrast optics and dissociated cell culture. Examples of these techniques as applied to growth cone research and more recently introduced ones such as patch clamping and scanning electron microscopy are represented in the book. The book starts off with an introduction by Trinkaus which cogently argues a place for growth cone motility in the more general context of directional cell movement. This implies that those studying growth cone behaviour would benefit from an awareness of the state of knowledge of other examples of cell movement (and vice versa). It is a pity then that a few papers in this book were not devoted to such pertinent topics as fibroblast movement, chemotaxis in neutrophils or even to microvillus structure. The book is divided up into three sections dealing with in-vivo, in-vitro and electrophysiological aspects. The individual contributions collectively represent the most comprehensive assembly of papers on growth cones so far published. The book is also something of an imaginative publishing venture because it started life as an issue of the Journal of Neuroscience Research (Vol. 13, number 1 /2 ) entirely devoted to invited research papers on growth cones. The consequences of this unusual genesis are that it is very up-todate and the papers have a uniformity of style, in marked contrast to many books of symposia or meetings which it most closely resembles. Several of the papers are mainly descriptive, dealing with such things as the appearance of HRP-filled growth cones /n v./vo .(Mason, Reh and Constantine-Pa~om; Harris et ~/.) ,and, beautifally revealed, in the scanning electron microscope (Roberts and Patton), but these do not bring us noticeably closer to understanding growth cone motility or neurite extension. Studying channels in the growth cone plasma membrane and associated electrical fields or the responses of the growth cone to directly applied substances such as serotonin (Haydon et al.), NGF (Connolly et al., and Gundersen) or substrate bound molecules such as laminin (Hammarback et al.) are already beginning to do so. Two papers are technically ingenious, the first, by Freeman et al., reports the measurement of currents generated by growth cones in culture using a circularly vibrating probe. Ion substitution experiments seem to indicate that a Ca 2+ flux is responsible and the authors postulate that this may be involved in several processes including neurotransmitter release a property now known of growth cones. Importantly, Freeman et al. also show that the threshold for applied current densities necessary to re-direct growth cone movement is several orders of magnitude higher than the endogenous currents. The second paper, by O'Lagne et aL, reports on the morphological and electrophysiological properties of giant growth cones produced by fusion of the neuroae-like clone PC12. These monsters look set to provide us with much useful information. What is conspicuously lacking here, because of past technical difficulties, is a biochemical analysis of growth cones, in particular the contractile apparatus through which, presumably, all factors affecting motility operate. Perhaps the recent development of techniques to isolate growth cones from developing brain will help close this gap. In the meantime this book is highly recommended. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1016/0166-2236(86)90100-1 |
| Volume Number | 9 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://api.elsevier.com/content/article/pii/0166223686901001 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0166223686901001?dgcid=api_sd_search-api-endpoint |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1016/0166-2236%2886%2990100-1 |
| Journal | Trends in Neurosciences |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
