Lynne Marie Musgrave Angerer (December 7, 1944 – March 30, 2013)[1] was a developmental biologist most notable for research with sea urchin development during her time spent as Head of the Developmental Mechanisms (NIDCR) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).[2] She worked at the University of Rochester and received her PhD at Johns Hopkins University studying chromatin structures.[2]
Lynne Angerer is best known for her research of determining the cellular fates of cells in sea urchins. With her sea urchin work she was able to develop a method of in situ hybridization through the use of RNA probes.[2] Another breakthrough developed by Angerer was the use of morpholino-substituted antisense oligonucleotides in the sea urchin to knock down and interfere with individual genes.[2] This is achieved through the usual configuration of expression a ribosome attached with a phosphodiester bond being replaced by morpholine ring attached with a phosphodiamidate linkage; this process prevents the ribosome from attaching and this specific gene is not expressed.[3] Both of these procedures she developed are now the industry standard.
Angerer also discovered that specific neurons derive from a unique tissue in an organism's gut, this finding challenged the central dogma which previously stated that neurons only derived from embryonic tissues.[4] Angerer and her husband Robert played a major role in the sequencing the sea urchin genome for the first time. The sequences that she found are used widely in sea urchin studies.[2]