Frontiers in Bioscience-Landmark (FBL) is published by IMR Press from Volume 26 Issue 5 (2021). Previous articles were published by another publisher on a subscription basis, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Frontiers in Bioscience.
During brain development, various transcription factors are activated in the regional specific manner and define the identities characteristic to individual regions, and many of such factors have been identified in the vertebrate brain, by taking advantage of the structural and functional conservation of them with the invertebrate counterparts. However, it is still largely unknown why individual transcription factors can define the final morphology and function of the tissues expressing these factors because of the lack of knowledge on which genes are actually up- or down-regulated as downstream targets of individual transcription factors. In this review, we introduce novel technologies which we have invented or improved as a part of our endeavor to identify and functionally analyze the downstream target genes of Isle-3 which are involved in development of the midbrain and the midbrain/hindbrain boundary region in zebrafish embryos. Our strategy and technologies can be applied to analyzing the downstream genes of any other transcription factors.