What history tells us Ⅻ. Boris Ephrussi's continuing efforts to create a 'genetics of differentiation'

摘要

Students in biology know that the work of Boris Ephrussi and George Beadle on the genetic control of eye pigmentation in Drosophila was the first step towards the establishment, a few years later, of the "one gene-one enzyme" relationship by George Beadle and Edward Tatum through their work on fungus Neurospora. After the Second World War, Ephrussi's discovery of the petite mutations that blocked respiration in yeast, and the demonstration of the cytoplasmic inheritance of these mutations, were decisive steps in the development of mitochondrial genetics in the 1960s. Less well known is the equally important role that he played in the development of cell hybridization and somatic cell genetics at the beginning of the 1960s. This development took place simultaneously with the establishment of cell lines derived from teratocarcinomas. Ephrussi's demonstration of the potential of these cell lines for the study of differentiation was exploited later by Francois Jacob and amply confirmed since by numerous studies of embryonic stem cells (Morange 2006).