48 Biochemical Journal Classics April 2016 © Biochemical Society Rose Scott-Moncrieff and the dawn of (Bio) Chemical Genetics Cathie Martin (John Innes Centre, UK) Between 1930 and 1940, Rose Scott-Moncrief and her colleagues and collaborators published a series of ground-breaking papers in the Biochemical Journal 1–3 and elsewhere 4,5 which established the biochemical pathways of pigment biosynthesis in fowering plants and the genetic basis for these biochemical activities. This work was fundamental in establishing the feld of biochemical genetics. This article reviews the work of Scott-Moncrief, analyses her collaborative research style and re- evaluates her place in the foundation of biochemical genetics. biochemists, which laid the foundation for the new discipline of ‘biochemical genetics’. Clear evidence of this focus on the relationship between genes and enzymes is given in Scott-Moncrief’s elegant 1931 paper in Nature 4 , ‘Te chemical efect of a Mendelian factor for fower colour’, where she described, for the frst time, the efect of a gene from pelargonium on oxidation of the B-ring of pelargonin to form cyanin. She even suggested, by analogy to oxidases reported in animals, that this activity might involve an oxidising enzyme. We know now that the gene she described encodes a favonoid 3’ hydroxylase. Tis article, in itself, clearly established the concept of genes determining enzyme activity and was supported by considerable additional research on the biochemical/genetic determinants of fower colour, well before Beadle and Tatum’s seminal 1941 publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 7 . Rose Scott-Moncrieff joined the Biochemistry Department in Cambridge in 1925 from a degree at Imperial College, London, and was mentored at first by Muriel Onslow (née Wheldale) on the genetic control of pigmentation in Antirrhinum majus 1 . Through this work, she gained expertise in isolating anthocyanins and in their characterisation which, at that time, involved laborious separation methods and assays of interactions with different chemicals – since no chromatographic separation methods were available. Scott-Moncrieff initiated a collaboration with Sir Robert and Lady Gertrude Robinson in Oxford (1928) who were working on chemical synthesis of anthocyanins, and who later came to be involved in surveying anthocyanins from a wide variety of plants. Encouraged by JBS Haldane with his connections to JIHI, then based at Merton in Surrey, In 1958 George Beadle and Edward Tatum were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine (jointly with Joshua Lederberg) for demonstrating that metabolism works through chains of chemical reactions, each catalysed by enzymes encoded by genes. Beadle and Tatum’s contribution was paraphrased as the ‘one gene-one enzyme concept’ 6 . However, in their 1941 paper 7 , Beadle and Tatum acknowledged the preceding work of numerous ‘physiological geneticists’ who had established ‘that many biochemical reactions are in fact controlled in specifc ways by specifc genes’. Amongst those ackno wledged for their work on the relationship between the biochemical and genetic control of fower colour were a group of early geneticists and biochemists working in collaboration at Te John Innes Horticultural Institution (JIHI) at Merton in Surrey, the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge and at the Dyson Perrins Laboratory, University of Oxford, including Rose Scott-Moncrief (Figure 1). Scott- Moncrief was the most junior of the geneticists and biochemists who worked together during the 1920’s and 1930’s on the synthesis of favonoid pigments and co-pigments in fowers of a broad range of horticultural plants including, Antirrhinum, Streptocarpus, Dahlia, Verbena, Pelargonium and Primula spp. In a 1940 review of the fndings of this period of research, Lawrence and Price 8 stated that ‘ it is in the fower pigments that gene action can be examined for the frst time in its fundamental sense, namely as governing simple chemical changes: oxidation, reduction, methylation and glycoside formation’. Understanding the chemical changes conferred by genes, would give rise to understanding their modes of action, eventually at a molecular level, and was the guiding philosophy of this research collaboration between geneticists and Downloaded from http://portlandpress.com/biochemist/article-pdf/38/2/48/852524/bio038020048.pdf by guest on 26 February 2023