Models of Axon Guidance and Bundling

[Arjen van Ooyen]

New Paper:

Models of Axon Guidance and Bundling During Development

H. G. E. Hentschel & A. van Ooyen
Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B (1999) 266: 2231-2238.

Request reprint:
A.van.Ooyen at nih.knaw.nl

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http://www.cns.ed.ac.uk/people/arjen/papers/bundle_abstract.html


ABSTRACT

Diffusible chemoattractants and chemorepellants, together
with contact attraction and repulsion, have been implicated 
in the establishment of connections between neurons and
their targets. Here we study how such diffusible and contact
signals can be involved in the whole sequence of events from 
bundling of axons, guidance of axon bundles towards their
targets, to debundling and the final innervation of individual
targets. By means of computer simulations, we investigate the
strengths and weaknesses of a number of particular mechanisms 
that have been proposed for these processes.
 



-- 
Arjen van Ooyen, Netherlands Institute for Brain Research,
Meibergdreef 33, 1105 AZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
email: A.van.Ooyen at nih.knaw.nl 
website: http://www.cns.ed.ac.uk/people/arjen.html  
phone: +31.20.5665483  fax: +31.20.6961006