 HHMI's Thomas M. Jessell on Cell Differentiation
One of the salient lessons to come out of developmental
biology over the last two decades is that the mechanisms that control invertebrate
development are conserved to an extraordinary extent, from fruit flies to humans. This
lesson was put to the test in 1992 when researchers from Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins,
the University of California at San Francisco, and Oxford set out to find the mammalian
equivalents of the hedgehog gene known to play an important role in pattern formation in
the developing fruit fly. The result, within the course of a year, was the discovery of three new mammalian genes--known as sonic, indian,
and desert hedgehog--and the realization that the proteins
they coded for could account for a significant fraction of all the
developmental interactions known to occur in the vertebrate
embryo.... |
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