Fig. 5

Microvillous sensory neurons derive from preplacodal precursors: backtracking.

(A–C) Confocal projections from a representative 4D dataset at 36, 28, 20 and 12 hpf showing the position of the nuclei backtracked from 10 sox10:eGFP-negative (A, pink), 10 lens (B, yellow) and 10 sox10:eGFP-positive (C, blue) cells at each timepoint. The embryo is shown with anterior up. Scalebars represent 40 μm. (D) Schematic representation of an embryonic head at 36 hpf and the anterior neural plate (NP, dark grey) and adjacent preplacodal ectoderm (light grey) at 12 hpf; the cranial neural crest (CNC) at the earlier stage is indicated. While the 36 hpf head shows the colour code of the backtracked lineages, the position of backtracked nuclei at 12 hpf is indicated in the preplacodal ectoderm. The 12 hpf schema represents the results obtained from 7 epithelia (4 embryos) for 41 sox10:GFP-positive cells and 44 sox10:eGFP-negative cells; the 10 lens cells were backtracked from a pair of epithelia in a single 4D dataset only.