When he was a faculty member at the University of Miami and an HHMI investigator, Howard Lenhoff found a green Hydra polyp in an aquarium at a tropical fish store. He took this polyp to his laboratory and founded a line with it, which he called Chlorohydra viridissima Florida strain 1961, with 1961 presumably indicating the year in which the line was established. This line produced a number of embryos. Among the hatchlings from these embryos were some that ate shrimp and grew in size, but did not produce buds. Rather, they formed ectopic heads. One of these animals was used to establish a line. Lenhoff originally called this the non-budding mutant. It is now known as the multiheaded mutant or the Lenhoff mutant. The first paper describing this line was published by Lenhoff in Science in February of 1965 (Lenhoff, 1965). The line has been propagated since then in various labs. The Steele lab obtained it in November of 2011 from Dr. Sabine Hoffmeister-Ullerich of the Zentrum für Molekulare Neurobiologie (ZMNH) in Hamburg, Germany. Dr. Hoffmeister-Ullerich began culturing the strain when she was a postdoc in Chica Schaller’s lab in Heidelberg. Originally, Chica’s lab obtained the strain from Lenhoff (Schaller et al., 1977). This mutant Hydra strain has been propagated continuously in the lab longer than any other Hydra strain, and we know its provenance from its origin until today.

REFERENCES

Lenhoff, H.M., 1965. Cellular Segregation and Heterocytic Dominance in Hydra. Science 148, 1105-1107.

Schaller, H.C., Schmidt, T., Flick, K., Grimmelikhuijzen, C.J., 1977. Analysis of morphogenetic mutants of hydra : II. The non-budding mutant. Wilehm Roux Arch Dev Biol 183, 207-214.