Disappearance of Temporal Collinearity in Vertebrates and Its Eventual Reappearance
In 1999 T. Kondo and D. Duboule performed excisions of posterior upstream DNA domains in mouse embryos and they observed that for an extended excision (including Evx gene) the Hox genes of the cluster were simultaneously expressed with the first Hoxd1 gene ‘as if’ Temporal Collinearity (TC) had disappeared. According to a Biophysical Model (BM) during Hox gene expression, Hox clusters behave similar toexpanding elastic springs. For the extended upstream DNA excision, BM predicts the TC disappearance and an experiment is proposed to test this BM prediction. In the chick limb bud C. Tickle et al. observed that the excision of the apical ectodermal ridge (AER) caused the inhibition of HoxA13 expression. However, the implantation of FGF soaked beads at the tip of the limb could surprisingly rescue HoxA13 expression after 24 hours so that TC is restored.Brachyury transcription factor (TF) is essential in identifying the targets of this transcription and a chromatin immunoprecipitation microarray chip (ChIP-chip) was produced which can be inserted in the mouse embryonic cells. It is here proposed to insert this chip in the mutant cells where TC has disappeared and compare it to the limb bud case.Is TC restored? It is an important issue worth exploring.