BIOCHEMICAL STUDIES 

 OF HYBRIDS 



In all of modern biological science, few areas if any 

 have provided more rewarding results than has bio- 

 chemical genetics. Within a generation a few scat- 

 tered reports on the Mendelian inheritance of bio- 

 chemical characters (for example, flower color) have 

 been supplemented by innumerable examples. In 

 fact, much of our present knowledge of intermediary 

 metabolism of amino acids results from data pro- 

 vided through biochemical genetics. The stimulus 

 was furnished by the oft-cited paper of Beadle and 

 Tatum (1941), in which they reported an analysis of 

 biochemical mutants in the mold, Neurospora. For 

 this and subsequent work these investigators shared 

 (with Lederberg) the 1959 Nobel Prize. Now, hun- 

 dreds of biochemical mutants have been detected in 



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