Word: neurospora
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...Beadle teamed up with Dr. Edward L. Tatum, a chemist now of the Rockefeller Institute, and selected a new laboratory victim, the so-called red bread mold (Neurospora crassa), which is really a beautiful coral pink in its natural state, unmolested by geneticists. Neurospora is a geneticist's dream. When properly introduced, it mates and reproduces sexually. It also grows nonsexually, so a truckload of mold with the same heredity can be grown, if desirable, from a single spore. But the best thing about Neurospora is that it asks for so little. It thrives on a medium containing nothing...
Mutated Mold. The Beadle and Tatum plan for Neurospora was to try to create strains that differ from the normal mold in simple, chemical ways. Their method was simple, too. They irradiated mold with X rays to induce mutations. Then they gathered spores formed by sexual reproduction and laid them out on a sheet of agar jelly containing the minimum nutrients that natural wild mold requires. Some of the spores sprouted and grew normally, showing that they had not been mutated in any obvious way. Some were dead, perhaps mutated too much...
...Since Caltech is dedicated to science and engineering, it is only natural that its laboratories should outnumber classrooms about five to one. And out of these laboratories have come some major revolutions in knowledge. The terms that Caltech has made important -cosmic ray, Badger's rule, alpha helix, Neurospora, positron, meson and mumeson-may not be exactly household words, but they have become standard parts of science's vocabulary...
...biologists have been probing their own areas of the invisible. Geneticist Alfred H. Sturtevant described the linear order of genes; Calvin B. Bridges provided proof for the chromosome theory of heredity. In determining that genes control the synthesis of vitamins and amino acids, George Beadle discovered the bread mold, Neurospora, as an effective research tool. This has sped the progress of genetics a hundredfold, was partly responsible for the successful increased production of penicillin...