A single anterior-animal blastomere, which includes the presumptive neural region in the eight-cell embryo of the Halocynthia, a protochordate, when dissociated, cleavage-arrested with cytochalasin B, and cultured in isolation, differentiated exclusively to epidermal type judging from membrane excitability and immunoreactivity. However, when the same blastomere was cultured in contact with a single anterior-vegetal blastomere, which includes the presumptive notochordal region, it displayed Na spikes and showed no expression of the epidermal antigen, suggesting that "neural induction" resulted in a single cell during the interaction with a single neighboring cell. This simple two-cell system can be used for further studies on the induction mechanism.In spite of extensive studies (1-3), the mechanism of neural induction is still elusive. Part of the difficulty is due to the complexity of the multicellular interaction. If It has been shown that in the ascidian embryo cell cleavage is not necessary for differentiation of tissue-specific enzymes (4), antigens (5, 6), ultrastructural features (7), and various types of membrane excitability (5,8,9). Thus, when an embryo was cleavage-arrested at early stages and cultured, the large blastomeres further differentiated into neural, epidermal, muscular, or nonexcitable type, judging electrophysiologically from the type ofmembrane excitability (9). For example, Na spikes, indicating neural type differentiation, were observed in the anterior-animal blastomere, termed a4-2 (see Fig. 1), which includes the presumptive neural region, in 20% of the cleavage-arrested eight-cell embryos examined (9).Furthermore, in the ascidian embryo, a prototype of vertebrate embryos (10,11), it has been shown that the neural tissue develops from the presumptive neural region only after induction from the group of blastomeres that includes the presumptive notochordal and some endodermal regions (12, 13).Actually, in 1946, Reverberi and Minganti (12) described that induction from the anterior-vegetal quarter ofthe embryo, which is included in the anterior-vegetal blastomeres (A4-1s) at the eight-cell stage, is required for the development of the brain vesicle, sensory organs, and palps from the a4-2 in the ascidian tadpole larva (12,13). Therefore, we expect that if a cleavage-arrested a4-2 from the eight-cell embryo is cultured in isolation, the neural type differentiation will never be expressed; instead, if a4-2 is cultured in contact with A4-1, the neural type of differentiation will be expressed (see Fig. 1).
MATERIALS AND METHODSCulturing a Single Blastomere from the Ascidian Eight-Cell Embryo. Adult animals with eggs and sperm of Halocynthia roretzi Drashe were obtained from the seashore of northern Japan and were maintained in circulating seawater at 3YC. When transferred into seawater at 10'C, they spawned eggs and sperm during the daytime of the next several days. Eggs from one animal were fertilized by mixing with naturally spawned sperm or with surgically obtained sperm from ...