Entomological contributions to genetics: studies on insect germ cells linked genes to chromosomes and chromosomes to mendelian inheritance

摘要

One hundred years ago, in a pair of publications in the Biological Bulletin, Walter Sutton, then a graduate student of cytologist E.B. Wilson at Columbia University in New York, decreibed the chromosomes of the grasshopper Brachystola magna during spermatogenesis (W.S. Sutton, 1902, 1903). His detailed descriptions of these giant chromosomes during eight mitotic and two meiotic divisions, coupled with his clear and concise interpretation of the segregating paris, provided the first evidence that chromosomes behave simiarly to Mendel's hereditary factors.