 Dominant root-lattice highest weights have zero weight

If a dominant integral weight $\lambda$ lies in the root lattice, its finite-dimensional irreducible highest-weight representation contains zero as a weight. First $\lambda$ is a nonnegative integral combination of simple roots: a negative part would have negative inner product with $\lambda$, contradicting dominance. For any nonzero weight $\mu =\sum m_i{\alpha }_i$ with $m_i\ge 0$, the identity $(\mu ,\mu )=\sum m_i(\mu ,{\alpha }_i)>0$ supplies an index with $m_i>0$ and $⟨\mu ,{\alpha }_i^{\vee }⟩>0$. By Injectivity of sl2 lowering above weight zero, applying the corresponding lowering operator produces a nonzero vector of weight $\mu -{\alpha }_i$. Repetition reaches zero.