Why vitamin biotin is used in minimal medium in one gene and one enzyme?
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SEVENTY-FIVE years ago, George Beadle and Edward Tatum published their method for producing nutritional mutants in Neurospora crassa. Their study signaled the start of a new era in experimental biology, but its significance is generally misunderstood today. The importance of the work is usually summarized as providing support for the “one gene–one enzyme” hypothesis, but its major value actually lay both in providing a general methodology for the investigation of gene function and in suggesting a simple biochemical relationship between genes and the characters they control. I discuss the reasons for this misunderstanding and the role of Beadle and Tatum in the development of molecular biology.
This year (2016) marks the 75th anniversary of an article by George Beadle and Edward Tatum that ushered in a new era in experimental biology (Beadle and Tatum 1941a). Their work is properly seen as a major foundation stone of what is now called molecular biology, yet today its precise significance is largely misapprehended. It is worthwhile revisiting the biological scene at the time of their work, considering what they accomplished, and investigating the factors that may have led to what was really their major contribution being relatively overlooked.