Mutations and Mutagenesis

Abstract

The first problem facing the early bacterial geneticist was to prove that bacteria did have inherited traits. The earliest presumption was that bacteria and other microorganisms were too small to have any phenotypic traits which could be studied. That concept was disabused by the work of Beadle and Tatum, who demonstrated that biochemical reactions could be used as phenotypic traits and developed the famous “one gene-one enzyme” hypothesis. There was, however, still one remaining area of uncertainty about the existence of bacterial genetics. Many workers felt that the hypothesis of Lamarck regarding the inheritance of acquired traits was true for bacteria even though it had already been disproven for the higher eukaryotes. The first task of the fledgling science of bacterial genetics, then, was to prove that the same processes of mutation that had already been shown to occur in eukaryotes also occurred in prokaryotes.