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Forty years of genetics with Streptomyces: from in vivo through in vitro to in silico.

As an undergraduate at Cambridge in the early 1950s, I had found genetics the most exciting part of my courses. This was the main motivation for choosing Botany as my Part II (final year) option in the academic year 1953}54. Granted, there was the Department of Genetics at Cambridge, headed by none other than Ronald Fisher, the father of biological statistics and a true genius, but an advanced qualification in mathematics was a de facto entry ticket to Part II Genetics, reflecting the strong mathematical basis of research in that Department. In the Botany School, ‘biochemical genetics ’ was being studied – using Neurospora crassa – by Harold Whitehouse and Lewis Frost. During the Part II course in Botany, they far-sightedly emphasized the power and promise of microbial genetics for the future understanding of gene structure and function. In choosing a PhD project to start in October 1954 I heeded their advice. One of the topics on offer was Streptomyces. Here was a group of microbes apparently ‘ intermediate between bacteria and fungi ’, and so they could not fail to be interesting from a genetic point of view, given the clear differences that were emerging between the genetics of the few bacteria so far studied and the genetics of fungi and higher organisms. In the Pneumococcus, Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium, incomplete genomes were transferred from donor to recipient strains, by any of three bizarre processes (transformation, conjugation and transduction), to yield incomplete zygotes, whereas in fungi and higher organisms (except those that were asexual) life cycles, including a complete diploid stage and meiosis, were the rule.