One hundred years of pleiotropy: a retrospective

Pleiotropy is defined as the phenomenon in which a single locus affects two or more distinct phenotypic traits. The term was formally introduced into the literature by the German geneticist Ludwig Plate in 1910, 100 years ago. Pleiotropy has had an important influence on the fields of physiological and medical genetics as well as on evolutionary biology. Different approaches to the study of pleiotropy have led to incongruence in the way that it is perceived and discussed among researchers in these fields. Furthermore, our understanding of the term has changed quite a bit since 1910, particularly in light of modern molecular data. This review traces the history of the term "pleiotropy" and reevaluates its current place in the field of genetics.     

From Pasteur to Mitchell: a hundred years of bioenergetics

The discovery in 1861 by Louis Pasteur that more yeast is formed aerobically than anaerobically per gram of glucose was the first clue to the difference in efficiency of glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation. During the first half of the 20th century the pathway of glycolysis was untraveled. Individual enzymes and cofactors were isolated and characterized. A reconstituted system of all enzymes and cofactors catalyzed steady-state glycolysis, provided an appropriate ATPase was added. The need for an ATPase, clearly demonstrated in 1945 by Otto Meyerhof, remains an important aspect of glycolysis that has been sorely neglected by textbooks. The coupling of oxidation and phosphorylation and the formation of the high-energy intermediate 1,3-diphosphoglycerate, discovered by Otto Warburg, are the key reactions of glycolysis. A high-energy intermediate formed during this process was identified as a thiolester. Early concepts of the mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation based on this model led to some frustrating and confusing years of search for high-energy intermediates. Important contributions from the laboratories of Boyer, Cohn, Chance, Green, Lardy, and Lehninger elucidated the properties of the mitochondrial process. Then Peter Mitchell proposed in 1961, 100 years after the publication by Pasteur, that the "high-energy intermediate" is an electrochemical proton gradient generated by the electron transport chain and utilized by a proton turbine (the mitochondrial ATPase complex) to generate ATP. This concept is now widely accepted. Several problems remain to be solved. How are the protons translocated during electron transport? How many protons per site? What is the mechanism of ATP generation during proton flux via the mitochondrial ATPase?     

A hundred years of gemellology

Over the past hundred years, since Sir Francis Galton first pointed out its scientific value, the study of twins has considerably widened its scope and significance. Gemellology has come to represent an important branch of human genetics and to be applied to the most diverse fields of biomedical and behavioral research, besides obviously contributing to the study of the specific biological, medical, and psychological aspects of the twin condition. More recently, then, it has in turn originated a new branch of modern genetic research, chronogenetics. Finally, sponsored and coordinated by the Mendel Institute in Rome, an International Society for Twins Studies has developed.