Discovery
The hedgehog gene (hh) was first identified in the classic Heidelberg screens of Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, as published in 1980. These screens, which led to her winning the Nobel Prize in 1995 along with developmental geneticist Edward B. Lewis, identified genes that control the segmentation pattern of Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) embryos. The hh loss of function mutant phenotype causes the embryos to be covered with denticles (small pointy projections), resembling a hedgehog.
Investigations aimed at finding a hedgehog equivalent in mammals revealed three homologous genes. The first two discovered, desert hedgehog and Indian hedgehog, were named for species of hedgehogs, while sonic hedgehog was named after Sega's video game character Sonic the Hedgehog. In zebrafish, the orthologues of the three mammalian hh genes are: shh a, shh b, (formerly described as tiggywinkle hedgehog named for Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, a character from Beatrix Potter's books for children), and indian hedgehog b (formerly described as echidna hedgehog, named for the spiny anteater, though this may have also been a playful reference to Knuckles the Echidna, another character from the Sonic the Hedgehog series of video games).
Read more about this topic: Sonic Hedgehog
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