The Genetic Relations of Plant Colors in Maize (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Genetic Relations of Plant Colors in Mai...)
Excerpt from The Genetic Relations of Plant Colors in Maize
Under the designation plant colors are included the colors other than those related to chlorophyll, commonly seen in, but not limited to, such external plant parts of maize as the culm, the staminate inflorescence, the husks, the leaf sheaths, and to some extent the leaf blades. In con trast to this group are colors and color patterns related to chlorophyll or associated with the pericarp and the cob, the silks, the endosperm, the aleurone. The colors included in the group considered here are due to water-soluble pigments, but the same is true of some of the other color groups named above. Moreover, colors of the chlorophyll group (lind strom, 1918) are found in the same plant parts as are the plant colors considered in this account. The plant colors as a whole are closely interrelated, but they are closely related also to aleurone colors and to certain of the silk and pericarp colors. It is obvious, therefore, that, while this classification is a more or less natural one, it is based primarily on convenience.
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A Fifth Pair Of Factors, Aa, For Aleurone Color In Maize, And Its Relation To The Cc And Rr Pairs...
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A Fifth Pair Of Factors, Aa, For Aleurone Color In Maize, And Its Relation To The Cc And Rr Pairs; Issue 16 Of Memoir (Cornell University. Agricultural Experiment Station)
Rollins Adams Emerson
Cornell University, 1918
Technology & Engineering; Agriculture; Agronomy; Crop Science; Corn; Technology & Engineering / Agriculture / Agronomy / Crop Science
Rollins Adams Emerson was an American geneticist who rediscovered the laws of inheritance established by Gregor Mendel.
Background
He was born in Pillar Point, New York, near Sackets Harbor on the eastern end of Lake Ontario. He was the second of three children and older of two sons of Charles David Emerson, a farmer, and Mary Caroline (Adams) Emerson.
Both parents were of seventeenth-century Massachusetts descent, his mother's forebear being the progenitor of the Adams family of Braintree.
Education
In 1893 Emerson entered the agricultural college of the University of Nebraska, where he was strongly influenced by the noted teacher and botanist Charles E. Bessey.
While still an undergraduate, Emerson was appointed assistant horticulturalist at the University's Agricultural Experiment Station and spoke at meetings of the Nebraska Academy of Science on subjects as diverse as the internal temperature of tree trunks and the horticultural setting of farmhouses.
While at Harvard for graduate study (1910 - 1911), he worked with the plant geneticist Edward M. East, an authority on quantitative inheritance, and received the D. Sc.
Career
After receiving a degree in 1897, he moved to Washington, D. C. , to become an assistant editor in the Experiment Station's Office of the Department of Agriculture.
In 1899 Emerson moved back to the University of Nebraska as horticulturalist in the Experiment Station and assistant professor and head of the department of horticulture; he became professor in 1905.
Emerson carried on a remarkable variety of activities. His early publications show his concern with the improvement of sand cherries, better means of spraying orchards, and the beautification of school grounds.
An innovative teacher, he fostered individualized practical work by students. Increasingly, however, his primary interests focused on plant breeding and genetics. His first major studies in heredity were carried out with garden beans.
A preliminary report (1902) on variation in bean hybrids shows that he was familiar with Mendelian principles, which had been "rediscovered" in 1900 by European biologists. A major summary on the inheritance of seed color in the bean (1909) was not only thoroughly Mendelian but also dealt with genetic modifiers and environmental influences.
At about this time some interesting and rather unexpected results roused Emerson's particular interest in maize, especially its quantitative characters such as ear length and row number. While at Harvard for graduate study (1910 - 1911), he worked with the plant geneticist Edward M. East, an authority on quantitative inheritance, and received the D. Sc. in 1913.
In the same year he and East published an influential paper, The Inheritance of Quantitative Characters in Maize (Nebraska Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin No. 2), which remains a classic.
Emerson left Nebraska in 1914 to become professor and head of the department of plant breeding at Cornell University, positions he held until his retirement in 1942. At Cornell, Emerson and his students established maize as one of the best understood and most utilizable objects for genetic research.
Although no single investigation by Emerson constituted a major breakthrough, the sum of his work was enormously important. He was notable for his rigorous, objective analysis of data, as exemplified in his The Genetic Relations of Plant Color in Maize (1921).
A Summary of Linkage Studies in Maize (1935), written with George W. Beadle and Allan C. Fraser, catalogued over 300 genes of maize, included descriptions, designated the appropriate symbols, and, when available, gave the chromosomal locations of the genes.
Much of the information was derived from investigations made by Emerson and his students. Emerson, characteristically, was fascinated by the difficult genetic problems of his time, such as variegation and the inheritance of quantitative characters. Many of his efforts were directed against problems that remained recalcitrant long after, but he provided a firm base for subsequent research.
Although his chief work dealt with the genetics of maize, he never lost interest in practical biology and was persistently active in breeding vegetables; even after retirement he continued to experiment with celery and beans.
Emerson had far greater influence on genetics than can be estimated by assessing his research. After his first years at Cornell he did little formal teaching but, particularly in the period from about 1920 to 1935, he directed a large number of graduate and postdoctoral students who became major participants in the next, dynamic generation of geneticists.
An intellectual pedigree stemming directly from Emerson includes Beadle, later a Nobel laureate; Milislav Demerec, who became director of the influential Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, New York; Marcus M. Rhoades, the cytogeneticist; and George F. Sprague, geneticist and breeder of maize.
Leaders in plant breeding as well as genetics emerged from Emerson's tutelage, and his foreign students became significant scientists in their own countries. Cornell was in an era of strength in biology, and exceptional students were drawn by other members of its distinguished faculty. One of these was the cytologist Lester W. Sharp, whose students, including the brilliant Barbara McClintock, interacted strongly with those in the Emerson group. But though Emerson's gifted students must have learned from one another, his own persistent and hard-headed research, together with his integrity and generous fairmindedness, provided the definitive intellectual environment.
In the same spirit, Emerson initiated the organization, in 1928, of a central clearinghouse for seed stocks and the exchange of unpublished data and ideas among maize geneticists both in the United States and abroad, initially by means of an annual mimeographed newsletter, which first appeared in 1932. This "Maize Genetics Cooperation, " as it became known, was so helpful that geneticists working with other organisms used it as a model for the Drosophila Information Service, the Microbial Genetics Bulletin, and the Neurospora Newsletter, among others. Never free of administrative duties, Emerson served as dean of the Cornell Graduate School from 1925 to 1931 and as faculty representative on the board of trustees from 1925 to 1928. He was a member of the National Research Council, and had major responsibility for the Sixth International Genetics Congress, which met at Cornell in 1932.
Respect for Emerson's accomplishments was shown by his election to the presidencies of the American Society of Naturalists (1923) and of the Genetics Society of America (1933) and to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1927. Emerson was more than six feet tall, physically powerful and energetic; his long hours in the cornfield and the pace of his work became legendary. In addition to the pleasures of research, he was devoted to his family and found time for nonprofessional interests.
After his wife died in 1942, he chose to do much of his own housework.
During the summer of 1947 Emerson underwent surgery that revealed a carcinoma of the stomach. He continued to work, as much as he was able, until his death in Ithaca, New York, a few months later at the age of seventy-four.
He was buried at East Lawn Cemetery, Ithaca. A major building at Cornell, dedicated in 1968, was given his name. His son Sterling also became a noted geneticist.