The leaving or Q fraction of the murine cerebral proliferative epithelium: a general model of neocortical neuronogenesis.

Neurons of neocortical layers II-VI in the dorsomedial cortex of the mouse arise in the pseudostratified ventricular epithelium (PVE) through 11 cell cycles over the six embryonic days 11-17 (E11-E17). The present experiments measure the proportion of daughter cells that leave the cycle (quiescent or Q fraction or Q) during a single cell cycle and the complementary proportion that continues to proliferate (proliferative or P fraction or P; P = 1 - Q). Q and P for the PVE become 0.5 in the course of the eighth cycle, occurring on E14, and Q rises to approximately 0.8 (and P falls to approximately 0.2) in the course of the 10th cycle occurring on E16. This indicates that early in neuronogenesis, neurons are produced relatively slowly and the PVE expands rapidly but that the reverse happens in the final phase of neuronogenesis. The present analysis completes a cycle of analyses that have determined the four fundamental parameters of cell proliferation: growth fraction, lengths of cell cycle, and phases Q and P. These parameters are the basis of a coherent neuronogenetic model that characterizes patterns of growth of the PVE and mathematically relates the size of the initial proliferative population to the neuronal population of the adult neocortex.