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First published online September 26, 2008
doi: 10.1242/10.1242/dev.021196

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Induction into the Hall of Fame: tracing the lineage of Spemann's organizer

Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Center for Integrative Genomics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3200, USA.

e-mail: harland{at}berkeley.edu

SUMMARY

The grafting experiments of Spemann and Mangold have been a textbook classic for years, but as with many conclusions from experimental embryology, the idea that the dorsal lip of the blastopore `organized' the early patterning of the embryo has sometimes come under question. In their 1983 paper in JEEM, Smith and Slack extended these classical experiments in newts to the now-standard amphibian model Xenopus laevis. By using injected lineage tracers, they distinguished the fates of graft and host, and showed unambiguously that the organizer is responsible for neural induction and that it dorsalizes the mesoderm.