Since the beautiful images of Santiago Ramón y Cajal provided a first glimpse into the immense diversity and complexity of cell types found in the cerebral cortex, neuroscience has been challenged and inspired to understand how these diverse cells are generated and how they interact with each other to orchestrate the development of this remarkable tissue. Some fundamental questions drive the field’s quest to understand cortical development: what are the mechanistic principles that govern the emergence of neuronal diversity? How do extrinsic and intrinsic signals integrate with physical forces and activity to shape cell identity? How do the diverse populations of neurons and glia influence each other during development to guarantee proper integration and function? The advent of powerful new technologies to profile and perturb cortical development at unprecedented resolution and across a variety of modalities has offered a new opportunity to integrate past knowledge with brand new data. Here, we review some of this progress using cortical excitatory projection neurons as a system to draw out general principles of cell diversification and the role of cell-cell interactions during cortical development.

中文翻译：

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让 Ramón y Cajal 感到自豪：大脑皮层细胞身份和多样性的发展


自从 Santiago Ramón y Cajal 的美丽图像让我们第一次看到了大脑皮层中发现的细胞类型的巨大多样性和复杂性以来，神经科学一直受到挑战和启发，以了解这些不同的细胞是如何产生的，以及它们如何相互作用以协调这种非凡组织的发育。一些基本问题推动了该领域对理解皮层发育的探索：控制神经元多样性出现的机制原则是什么？外源性和内源性信号如何与物理力和活动整合以塑造细胞身份？神经元和神经胶质细胞的不同群体在发育过程中如何相互影响以保证适当的整合和功能？强大的新技术的出现，以前所未有的分辨率和各种模式来分析和扰乱皮层发育，这为将过去的知识与全新的数据相结合提供了新的机会。在这里，我们使用皮层兴奋性投射神经元作为一个系统来回顾其中一些进展，以得出细胞多样化的一般原则和细胞间相互作用在皮层发育过程中的作用。