The Sloan Kettering researcher used mutagenic screening to probe genes and molecular pathways, including Toll and Hedgehog, essential to development in fruit flies and mice.
The finding confirms that a cluster of cells that directs the fate of other cells in the developing embryo is evolutionarily conserved across the animal kingdom.
Damaged lysosomes are repaired by a lipid-based signaling pathway dubbed PITT that could be targeted to treat neurodegenerative disease, its discoverers say.