“…Specifically, secretion of SHH ligand from the ectoderm activates pathway activity in the adjacent cranial neural crest-derived mesenchyme (Marcucio et al, 2005;Hu and Marcucio, 2009;Hu et al, 2015;Xavier et al, 2016). Demonstrating clinical relevance, we have shown that transient in utero exposure to the Shh pathway inhibitor cyclopamine causes lateral clefts of the lip that typically extend into the primary and secondary palate, and that this model recapitulates human non-syndromic cleft lip with or without cleft palate (CL/P) (Lipinski et al, 2008b(Lipinski et al, , 2010(Lipinski et al, , 2014. Here, we utilized this pathway-specific mouse model of cleft lip to identify and investigate the mechanism of action of Shh target genes that mediate normal and abnormal upper lip morphogenesis.…”