Ablating the fixed lineage conjecture: Commentary on Kimble 1981

Abstract

In 1981 Judith Kimble published what became a classic paper in developmental biology (Kimble, 1981). The history of nematode cell lineage dating back to Boveri and zur Strassen in the 19th century indicated that nematodes had a fixed cell lineage. This invariance was confirmed in a modern study by Sulston and Horvitz (1977). Kimble's PhD work confirmed this except for two cases of indeterminate development (Kimble and Hirsh, 1979). As a postdoc, Kimble followed up using a laser microbeam system developed by John White (Sulston and White, 1980a, Sulston and White, 1980b) to selectively remove cells. With this system, if you can see the cell with Nomarski DIC optics, you can kill it. This paper laid the groundwork for analysis of the AC-VU decision, hence for the genetic analysis of LIN-12/Notch signaling (Greenwald, 2012), and for vulval induction, hence for the genetic analysis of the EGFR-RAS pathway (Sternberg, 2006).

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