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1 Institut de Génétique et de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire, CNRS/INSERM/ULP/Collège de France, BP 10142, 67404 Illkirch Cedex, Strasbourg, France; Present address: Beckman Institute, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA. 2 Institut de Génétique et de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire, CNRS/INSERM/ULP/Collège de France, BP 10142, 67404 Illkirch Cedex, Strasbourg, France. 3 Departments of Medicine and Molecular Biology, Center for Cardiovascular Development, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Pascal Dollé , E-mail: dolle{at}igbmc.u-strasbg.fr
A striking characteristic of vertebrate embryos is their bilaterallysymmetric body plan, particularly obvious at the level of thesomites and their derivatives like the vertebral column. Segmentationof the presomitic mesoderm must therefore be tightly coordinatedalong the left and right embryonic sides. Here we show thatmutant mice defective for retinoic acid synthesis exhibit delayedsomite formation on the right side, due to a left-right desynchronizationof the segmentation clock oscillations. Thus, retinoic acidacts as an endogenous signal to maintain the bilateral synchronyof mesoderm segmentation, and therefore controls bilateral symmetry,in vertebrate embryos.
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