Or slant*

 

January 6, 1952

Dr. BE. L. Tatua

Biology Department

Stanford University
vailfornia

Dear Ed:

After wishing you and yours a moat happy 1952, I want to ask the favor
of a lydpail tube} if you nave one handy, of strain 579. for the past six
months, wa have been exerting curselves at, finally, preserving our cultures
but this cone managed to get away. dost everything else has been recovered,
checked, and‘stored. jie're ualng tuoas with vaClo as suggested to us by
Hershey: this works very weil for swall-acele operations (i.e, about 2000
cultures) like ours.

soa might be inkerested in the imacdiate reasous for our wantahng this
strain. In general,we had found no indications of specific incompatibilities
for recombination of \-12 cultures, However, Cather picked up a 58-161 deriva-
tive that would not aityss with Yio og any of ite further mutants. This eul-
ture wail, however, crogs quite weid wlth {-l0-lika aogregan:ts extracted from
heterozygotes, or with TaL-B,-3" recowbinaity from crosses of Y-10 x 58-161 3°
picked up on TLB,-streptomyoin agar. This may mean that Y-10-and Esther's
culture have picked up a cotymon self-incompatibility mutation , so we're
checking the ancestry of Y-10. Her culture and Y10 S* both cross with K~12,
bo the “mtation® must have oc urred since.

\

itm looking forward with entichpation to seeing you sometine this Spring,
according to the Ensyme Seminar aciiqdule, so will spare you a long letter.
Ed Adelberg msy have mentioned the r lica-plating method to you [you can
imagine how much more I would have wanted this technique as a graduate sthdent].
Have you perchance tried it with Neurospora? I've been doing a few experi-
ments lately with actinomycetes, and it Hes been indispensabis in picking up
auxotrophs there. In 5. griseus, by the effective heterokaryosis seems
to occur quite readily; the evidence for redembination is still equivocal but,
perhansg encouraging. There isn't mich more 8 on that I wouldn't rather
talk to you about later. Zinder is writing up fijs thesis on the Salmonella
"transtuctions", and, more ar less, looking for & job. He was East last week
and ran into numerous rumours, disseminated by Dekbruck, of big doings with
K-12 at Caltech, but everyone seems to have heard the details but ourselves.

One lat note: Clifton sent about 20 coli cultures (K~ ete.). One of these
was interfrtile. This objective teet should put your serendipity rating at
about 20. hb mating systems outside the K-12 group have been found yet.

 
 
  

Sincerely,

Joshua Ledetberg