Early reports that Omicron causes less-severe disease than Delta seem to be borne out, but it’s not yet clear to what extent that’s due to the variant itself versus the populations it’s infecting.
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.