THE BELGIAN SOCIETY FOR CELL BIOLOGY: GENES AND DEVELOPMENT 36th ORDINARY MEETING

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 450 KB
• Volume: 20
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1065-6995
• DOI: 10.1006/cbir.1996.0034

✦ Synopsis

At the turn of the last century, the field of heredity included embryology: the 'entwicklungsmechanik' of His, Roux and Driesch obviously contained genetic components. The split between genetics and embryology gradually emerged afterwards. It was formalized in 'The Theory of the Gene' (1926) by T. H. Morgan and paradoxically even more in his 'Embryology and Genetics' (1934), a joint textbook instead of an attempt to unify the fields.

Eminent embryologists such as H. Spemann and F. R. Lillie ignored genetics. The path from Experimental Embryology to Developmental Genetics was first traveled by the former Spemann's graduate student Salome Gluecksohn-Schoenheimer. This happened soon after she met the American geneticist Leslie C. Dunn who was studying a mouse strain with a dominant mutation responsible for tail shortening, Brachyury (T) detected in 1927 by N. Dobrovolskaia-Zavadskaia. Homozygous condition resulted in spontaneous abortion at 11 days in utero correlated with missing of the posterior half of the embryo body. Since it soon appeared that T mutation was involved in axial determination, Salome Gluecksohn-Schoenheimer found that she might be working on a gene responsible for the posterior organizing substance of the mammalian embryo. Her first paper on that subject in which she coined the expression 'developmental genetics ' was published in 1938 (Gluecksohn-Schoenheimer, 1938). She then pursued a research program linking embryonic organizers and specific genes in the mouse mainly the now well documented T-locus genes, a 'super-gene complex' (Bennett, 1975).