In Vitro Study of Cartilage Induction in T/TMice

Abstract

A LARGE number of mutations (more than 20) have been demonstrated in the complex locus T in linkage group IX of the house mouse¹. Those mutations which have been studied embryologically appear to affect processes concerned with the formation and subsequent differentiation of the notochord–mesoderm system and its developmental dependent, the neural tube. The T\T embryos develop essentially normally through early somite stages, but at about the 4-somite stage there begin prothannic changes which result in an embryo entirely lacking the posterior portion of the body, and having no notochord, only remnants of somites and a neural tube both structurally and cellularly abnormal. This condition is clearly due to some interference with the processes of axial organization, but it has been impossible to define with descriptive methods which of these developmentally related structures is primarily affected by the mutation.