Word: neurospora
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...convocation of the high-domed American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, members listened closely to papers on such diverse subjects as Cytoplasmic Incompatibility in Neurospora and Bastards in the Roman Aristocracy. But the most surprising contribution was a half-hour gem of erudition, illustrated with colored slides, on The Iridescent Colors of Hummingbird Feathers. Author: Crawford H. Greenewalt, 57. whose excursions into advanced ornithology are somehow sandwiched into his workaday duties as president of massive E.I. du Pont de Nemours...
...July 14), who is this year's George Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford University, and Edward L. Tatum of Manhattan's Rockefeller Institute. Working together at Stanford University in 1940, they discarded the fruit flies traditionally used in studying heredity, employed instead a selected red bread mold, Neurospora crassa. The mold is easier to handle, its life chemistry is simpler, and yet it reproduces sexually...
...success in 1941, they had quite a collection of defective molds, each needing some extra nutrient or having some other gene-controlled chemical ailment. In a few years their imitators filled their own laboratories with molds as unnatural as the most monstrous fruit flies. The coral fluffs of normal Neurospora are rare in the test tubes and Petri dishes. In their place are blackish warts, lichenlike incrustations, or sick-looking globules. One horrible kind of mold grown in a moving liquid floats in bunches with limp limbs like soft, dead crabs...
...immediate, practical result of Neurospora genetics was the application of mold irradiation to wartime penicillin production. Much more important were the long-range scientific results. The success with Neurospora yielded new techniques for using molds and other small organisms as genetic tools. Out of its use flowed a new attitude toward genetics. No longer were genes considered abstract units of heredity. They became actual things, not entirely understood but known to be concerned with definite chemical actions. Professor Joshua Lederberg, 33, of the University of Wisconsin, probably the world's leading young geneticist, says that the Neurospora work...
Magic DMA. Since the Neurospora breakthrough, chemical genetics has made startling progress. Its most important movement has been down the scale of size toward the actual chemical molecules that control life and reproduction...