Studies on sodium azide as an inhibitor of amphibian development

✍ Scribed by Hall, Thomas S. ;Moog, Florence

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1948
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 688 KB
• Volume: 109
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-104X
• DOI: 10.1002/jez.1401090302

✦ Synopsis

If early amphibian embryos are exposed to weak solutions of sodium azide, their development is markedly retarded or, under certain conditions, totally suppressed. I n specific instances, individuals exposed to such treatment have been ohserved to develop normally after the treatment was stopped (Hall and Moog, '47). This result seemed to merit further investigation because of its possible relations to two fundamental problems in normal developmental physiology.

First, considerable evidcnce has been accumulated snggestiiig the existence in normally developing eggs of a metabolism of maintenance dissociable from that iiecessary for differentiation and growth. Any reversible total pause in development, natural or artificial, is an instance of such dissociation (Tyler, '42 ; Needham, '42, pp. 505-529). If, therefore, sodium azide can produce reversible developmental arrest, it may be assumed to be disengaging sustentive metabolism from developmental metabolism by selective suppression of the latter. Second, differentiation and growth a r e usually regarded as visible expressions of underlying metabolic changes which, if development is to be normal,, must proceed in a synchronous fashion. From this point of view, inhibitors which permit development to proceed a t a reduced speed without wholly suppressing it could act in either of two ways. An inhibitor which interfered differentially with different interactive de-339