Abstract:

The Pax6 gene belongs to the highly functionally and structurally conserved Pax gene family (Pax1–9) of tissue-specific transcription factors. The Pax family are instrumental in development and have a critical role in brain regionalisation and specification of subtypes of neurons within brain regions. Pax6 is one of the earliest gene products expressed in the developing embryo. Pax6 is a key neurogenic factor and a well-accepted neurogenic determinant. Indeed, Pax6 is frequently used as a marker of neural precursor status and recent studies have demonstrated that overexpression of both Pax6 and another transcription factor, Sox2, is sufficient to transdifferentiate fibroblast cells into induced neuronal progenitors (Maucksch et al., 2012), in line with it having been demonstrated that Pax6 alone induces neuronal specification of postnatal forebrain astrocytes.