Revelations from a bread mould

摘要

The filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa is an organism much loved by geneticists. Its genome sequence has now been unveiled, and includes some surprises―such as the relatively high number of genes. The lowly bread mould Neurospora crassa has a venerable history as a subject of scientific research. Its fame really began more than 60 years ago, with work by George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum that would later win them a Nobel prize. Before then, geneticists were studying genes as hypothetical entities that are transmitted from parents to offspring and―in an unknown way―control inherited traits (as illustrated in Fig. 1). Meanwhile, biochemists were looking at proteins and their functions in the cell. There seemed at the time to be little connection between the two disciplines. Working with Neurospora, however, Beadle and Tatum made the stunning discovery that genes as units of heredity also encode the proteins that carry out much of the work of the cell.