The Grunewald-O'Halloran conjecture for nilpotent Lie algebras of rank >= 1

Grunewald and O'Halloran conjectured in 1993 that every complex nilpotent Lie algebra is the degeneration of another, non isomorphic, Lie algebra. We prove the conjecture for the class of nilpotent Lie algebras admitting a semisimple derivation, remaining open for the class of characteristically nilpotent Lie algebras. In dimension 7, where the first characteristically nilpotent Lie algebras appear, we prove the conjecture and we also exhibit explicit nontrivial degenerations to every 7-dimensional nilpotent Lie algebra.