The Xenopus noggin promoter drives roof-plate specific transcription

During vertebrate neural development, inductive signals derived from the roof plate specify dorsal neural cell types of spinal cord as well as adjacent dermomytotome. Noggin has been demonstrated to play a pivotal role in this signaling network but how its expression is regulated remains unclear. To investigate this issue, we identified a 2066 bp Xenopus noggin 5′ flanking sequence which recapitulates the roof-plate expression of endogenous gene in transgenic frog tadpoles and we further mapped the roof-plate enhancer to a sequence as short as 79 bp. Our results, therefore, not only shed light on but also provide a powerful tool to the study of neural and somite patterning.