Early Papers of Interest
Hutchison, III CA, Newbold JE, Potter SS, and Edgell MH (1974). Maternalinheritance of mammalian mitochondrial DNA. Nature 251: 536.
This Nature paper was the first demonstration of the maternal inheritance of mitochondrial DNA in mammals. It was also one of the early applications of restriction enzymes. We showed that the restriction digest patterns of mtDNA from donkeys and horses were quite distinct, and that the progeny of their reciprocal crosses, mules and hinnies, always had the same pattern as the mother.
The author order is a recurring issue of interest for my papers. Basically, I really haven't worried much about author order. For this paper I was the graduate student that did the experiments, purified the mtDNAs, which was a bit of a challenge at the time, ran the digests and gels, and the other three authors were professors that thought of the experiments and wrote the paper. I probably had a reasonable claim for first author, but told them I didn't care, and ended up in the middle.
Potter SS, Brorein WJ, Jr., Dunsmuir P, and Rubin GM (1979). Transposition of elements of the 412, copia and 297 dispersed repeated gene families in Drosophila. Cell 17: 415-427.
This paper was the first molecular demonstration of the presence of transposable elements, or jumping genes, in eukaryotes. The sequences of a couple of transposable element families had been previously cloned by members of the Hogness lab. They did in situ hybridizations to the polytene chromosomes of Drosophila salivary glands and saw some differences in hybridization positions, but interpreted this to be the result of variations in polytenization of chromosomes in different strains, and not to reflect genuine differences in chromosome positions (See their Cold Spring harbor paper of around 1977).
In this paper we cloned "empty-filled" corresponding DNA sites from different Drosophila, showing that in some cases the site would have a transposable element and in other cases not. This clearly showed they could move about the genome. We also used reassociation kinetics to show that the copy number of the elements could dramatically increase in tissue culture cells, showing that in this situation the elements were de-repressed and moved and replicated like crazy.
I was Gerry Rubin's second post-doc. Gerry went on to do rather well.
Potter S, Truett M, Phillips M, and Maher A (1980). Eukaryotic transposable genetic elements with inverted terminal repeats. Cell 20: 639-647.
Truett M, Jones R, and Potter S (1981). Unusual structure of the FB family of transposable elements in Drosophila. Cell 24:753-763.
These papers were among the first from my own independent lab. The first one represents work we did during my first year as an assistant professor. Mark Phillips and Drew Maher (Senior Author!) were undergraduates that worked in my lab part time. They were both outstanding. These papers described the discovery of a new category of transposable element, the first that did not look like a retrovirus. We named them Foldback elements, or FB elements, because they carried inverted terminal repeats that could fold back on themselves following denaturation, forming pretty little stem loop lollipop structures when we looked at them with the electron microscope. Martha Truett and Richard Jones were my first graduate students. Martha went directly to industry to work for Chiron. Richard went on to do a post-doc at Harvard, and is now a professor at SMU, publishing some very high profile (Science, Nature) papers on the subject of gene expression memory.
Potter, SS (1982). DNA sequence of a foldback transposable element in Drosophila. Nature (article) 297: 201-204.
This was a single author Nature article. You don't see a lot of these. So I did all the work on this one. It represented a fairly massive sequencing project at the time, revealing a very interesting direct repeat structure within the inverted repeats of the Foldback elements.
Wichman H, Potter S, and Pine D (1985). Mys, a family of mammalian transposable elements isolated by phylogenetic screening. Nature 317: 77-81.
This paper described some novel transposable elements in mouse, and a general method for discovering new families of elements. Holly Wichman was my first Post-doc. She got the lab starting to do some mouse work. She went on to make quite a name for herself in the area of molecular evolution, serving on study sections, publishing good papers and becoming a professor. Dan Pine (Senior Author!) was an undergraduate working in the lab part time.
McNeish, J, Scott, W and Potter S (1988). Legless, a mutation in pHT1 line transgenic mice. Science 241:837-839.
This paper described a very interesting transgene insertional mutant we had made, with randomized left-right axis and severe limb defects. This mouse got us interested in laterality as well as limb development.
Mucenski, ML, McLain, K, Kier, AB, Swerdlow, SH, Schreiner, CM, Miller, TA, Pietryga, DW, Scott, WJ, Jr. and Potter, SS (1991). A functional c-myb gene is required for normal murine fetal hepatic hematopoiesis. Cell 65:677-689.
This was one of the earliest gene targeting papers. I haven't done a precise count, but I think it was one of the first ten. It described a pretty interesting phenotype resulting from the c-myb oncogene targeted mutation. Mike Mucenski, a postdoctoral fellow, picked the gene and made the mouse. He now works at Children's in the pulmonary biology division.
Davis, AP, Witte, DP, Hsieh-Li, HM, Potter, SS and Capecchi, MR (1995). Absence of radius and ulna in mice lacking hoxa-11 and hoxd-11. Nature 375:791-795.
The paper gave the most dramatic demonstration of the functional redundancy of paralogous Hox genes. We exchanged Hox mutant mice with the Capecchi lab and we analyzed the soft tissues, such as kidney, while he analyzed skeletons. Single mutants had relatively normal limbs and kidneys, while double mutants had severely defective limbs, with the paw attached to the elbow, and kidneys that were extremely small or absent. Although the work was pretty evenly divided, my lab ended up as middle authors. I figured it was OK, because I thought Mario would end up winning the Nobel Prize some day, and I'd be able to say I had published a paper with him. He has now won the Kyoto prize, with is more money than the Nobel. Mario is a very interesting guy.
Lowe, LA, Supp, DM, Sampath, K, Yokahama, T, Wright, CVE, Potter, SS, Overbeek, P and Kuehn, MR (1996). Conserved left-right asymmetry of nodal expression and alterations in murine situs inversus. Nature 381:158-161.
This was a collaboration, where Mike Kuehn's lab did the bulk of the work. We provided timed mutant embryos and he did in situ hybridizations. The results were pretty cool, showing randomized expression of left right markers in the legless mutants, with 1/4 showing left side only Pitx2 expression (normal), 1/4 showing right only, 1/4 showing both sides and 1/4 showing neither side.
Supp, D, Witte, DP, Potter, SS and Brueckner, M (1997). Mutation of an axonemal dynein affects left-right asymmetry in inversus viscerum mice. Nature 389:963-966.
This paper was the culmination of a huge effort by my graduate student, and then post-doc, Dorothy Supp. It describes the cloning of the gene responsible for the left right phenotype in the legless mutant, a dynein encoding gene that we named left right dynein, or LRD. After some discussion Dorothy and I decided to share the gene with Tina Brueckner at Yale, who had been trying to positionally clone the iv gene for several years. Tina then sequenced this gene and showed that the iv version had a single missense mutation at a critical position. Dave Witte showed that the gene is expressed at the node during early development. This work contributed to the development of the nodal flow model of left right development by a Japanese group.
Sheng, HZ, Moriyama, K, Yamashita, T, Li, H, Potter, SS, Mahon, KA and Westphal, H (1997). Multistep control of pituitary organogenesis. Science 278, 1809-1812.
Sharma, K, Sheng, HZ, Lettieri, K, Li, H, Karavanov, A, Potter, SS, Westphal, H and Pfaff, SL (1998). LIM homeodomain factors Lhx3 and Lhx 4 assign subtype identities for motor neurons. Cell 6:817-828.
These were collaborations where we contributed the mutant mice.
