GENES AND STRUCTURAL PATTERNS IN CILIATES - VANCE TARTAR AND THE CELLULAR ARCHITECTS

The one form of cytoplasmic inheritance that has not been assimilated into the Central Dogma is the inheritance of surface structural patterns, a phenomenon most clearly expressed in ciliates. Vance Tartar, although he worked with a genetically undomesticated organism (Stentor coeruleus), provided early evidence for the crucial role of clonally propagated features of the cell cortex. He showed that the capacity for development of cortical organelle systems is associated with a particular relational feature, the "locus of stripe contrast" (LSC), and that clonally inherited cortical variants (homopolar doublets) could be created at will by microsurgical operations that duplicated the LSC. Tartar also hoped to demonstrate the existence of what David Nanney called "cellular architects" by provoking stentors to carry out entirely novel types of morphogenetic performances. He eventually acknowledged failure, although the bizarre juxtapositions by which he attempted to elicit such novel performances did bring about specific and illuminating defects in cortical development. Subsequent analyses of similar defects in other ciliates revealed not the unitary "pattern factor" postulated by Tartar, but rather a hierarchy of distinct patterning mechanisms. Nonetheless, by pursuing an embryological approach toward morphogenesis in a highly regulative ciliate, Tartar uncovered relational aspects of pattern-determination; this, in my view, delineates the major problem that we must solve to gain understanding of intracellular patterning.