Abstract
In the developing cerebral cortex of the mouse, binding of antibodies directed against the extracellular matrix glycoprotein fibronectin occurs with a distinct temporal and spatial pattern. On the 10th embryonic day (E10), when the wall of the telencephalic vesicle is made up of only the proliferating cells of the ventricular zone, antifibronectin (aFN) binding is restricted to the blood vessels and pia-arachnoid. Fibronectin-like immunoreactivity first appears in the neuropil as small points of immunofluorescence among the earliest postmitotic neurons that form the preplate (E11-12). A short time later (E12-13), aFN immunoreactivity becomes more diffuse but continues to be restricted to the preplate. As newly arriving neurons form the cortical plate within the preplate (E13-14), aFN binding is present in the marginal zone above the cortical plate and in the subplate below it. Both the marginal zone and the subplate contain early afferents and the cells that were previously part of the preplate. Binding of aFN is transient; by E18-19 it has diminished to the point where it is no longer detectable except in the blood vessels and pia-arachnoid. The transient appearance of fibronectin-like immunostaining in the zones that contain early cortical afferents suggests that fibronectin plays a role in forming the migratory pathway for the growth cones of these axons. In this role it may be acting in concert with other extracellular matrix components such as hyaluronectin, glycosaminoglycans, and laminin, which have been shown to have similar spatial distributions.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)