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Marcus Rhoades, Preferential Segregation and Meiotic Drive
James A. Birchlera, R. Kelly Daweb, and John F. Doebleyca Division of Biological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri 65211,
b Plant Biology and Genetics, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602,
c Genetics Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706
Corresponding author: James A. Birchler, 117 Tucker Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211., birchlerj{at}missouri.edu (E-mail)
LONG before microarray biologists coined and promoted the term "discovery science," maize geneticists were avid practitioners of this mode of investigation. In fact, one might say that for a number of years, the field of maize genetics basically operated as discovery science. Many have speculated about why maize remains a model organism for genetic analysis, given its long life cycle relative to other species. It has many virtues, sometimes little understood or appreciated by outsiders, but the maize geneticist's style of science devoted to discovery and an unusually strong commitment to cooperation probably contributes to this trend. One of the great practitioners of this style of science was Marcus Rhoades (Fig 1), who often advised beginning graduate students: "Just get in the lab and start to work; you can't help but find something." "What are the facts?" was his common refrain to model building and theorizing. Along with his penchant for discovery was a dogged experimentalist attack to explore the parameters and dimensions of a new finding.
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Rhoades discovered the first case of cytoplasmic male sterility in maize; the independence of the plastid from nuclear control by the action of the iojap mutation; the Dotted "mutator" system that was later found to be a transposable element (see ![]()
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Rhoades was born in Missouri and raised in Kansas (![]()
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It was at Cornell that Rhoades began an enduring friendship with Barbara McClintock (![]()
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During his time at Cornell, Rhoades made many contributions to maize genetics and wrote his thesis on the first case of cytoplasmic male sterility found in maize. Rhoades regularly recalled his thesis defense. A chemist unfamiliar with the details of genetics was on his committee. After Rhoades was asked to leave the room at the end of the presentation, an innocent set of questions by this outside member to the committee on why cytoplasmic inheritance might be considered unusual led to an extended educational discussion. Time slipped by without the committee realizing that Rhoades was awaiting a decision in the hallway. Friends of Rhoades, seeing him pace back and forth, speculated that he was "in trouble." As a consequence of this experience, Rhoades always made certain that such discussions in which he took part were kept short.
While at Cornell, Rhoades played an important role in the 1932 International Congress of Genetics by preparing a "living chromosome map" in which mutant plants were planted in rows corresponding to their position on the chromosomes (![]()
| The discovery of preferential segregation |
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From Cornell, Rhoades accepted a position with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), first in Iowa and then in Arlington, Virginia. It was in this position that Rhoades discovered the phenomenon of preferential segregation. Albert ![]()
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In the hybrid mentioned above, Ab10 was carrying the recessive allele of r, and the normal chromosome 10 had the dominant allele. A testcross to the recessive r tester line produced an excess of colorless kernels in a 70:30 ratio instead of the expected 50:50 ratio. The altered ratio occurred on the heterozygous ears, but not when the plants were used as a pollen parent. When Rhoades swapped the R alleles so that the dominant marker was linked to Ab10, the majority of kernels were colored. In maize, as in most plants, megasporogenesis produces four cells, but three degenerate and do not develop into ovules. The basal megaspore differentiates into the megagametophyte via a few mitoses to produce the egg, polar nuclei, and associated cells. It was concluded that Ab10 must find its way into the basal megaspore more often than at random. A cytological examination of anaphase in the male flowers of plants with Ab10 (![]()
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Albert ![]()
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Rhoades's 1942 article on preferential segregation is an interesting study in objective detachment leading to a logical conclusion. He systematically covers the data that falsify one trivial explanation after another in an asymptotic approach to the conclusion of altered segregation. He even hung plants upside down in the greenhouse to see if the extra chromatin on Ab10 made it heavier and thus more prone to be present in the basal megaspore (there was no effect). There is a tone of disbelief throughout the article, but having disproved the alternatives, he concluded that preferential segregation must be occurring.
The receipt date on the preferential segregation article is listed as December 25, 1941. In 1940 Rhoades had accepted a position in the Department of Botany at Columbia University in New York City. One wonders how an article could possibly be received on Christmas Day? The answer lies in the fact that Rhoades was the Managing Editor of GENETICS at the time. The completed manuscript and its submission were apparently a gift to himself.
Interestingly, the tone of disbelief in his 1942 article continues even to the ![]()
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Many of Rhoades and Dempsey's later studies on Ab10 were included as notes in the Maize Genetics Cooperation Newsletter under some version of the title "Further studies on preferential segregation," describing work conducted during his tenure at the University of Illinois (19481958; Fig 3) and at Indiana University (19581974; Fig 4). Rhoades served two terms as the editor of the newsletter, from 1932 to 1935 and again from 1956 to 1974. Ellen Dempsey played a pivotal role in the assembly of the newsletter during the latter period. An offhand comment in Rhoades's presence about a "little" note in the newsletter was met with the friendly retort that "for Miss Dempsey, the Newsletter is a big publication," no doubt in honor of her substantial contributions to its yearly production. Rhoades also served on several editorial boards (![]()
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In his many service activities, Rhoades no doubt made a tremendous impact on the field of genetics. Many wished for his approbation. An attendee at the annual maize genetics meeting once commented, "Rhoades sits in the front row and passes judgment on all the talks." A more accurate interpretation is that Rhoades had a voracious appetite for maize genetics and high standards as an experimentalist. Rhoades was the perfect gentleman and would break up any heated scientific discussion by commenting, "This is good clean fun, but ..." At his last presentation at the maize meetings in 1987 at the age of 83, Rhoades talked on preferential segregation. In his conclusion, he said: "I know this may seem old fashioned to some of you, but it's the kind of thing that keeps an old maize geneticist like me going."
| Preferential segregation, segregation distortion, and meiotic drive |
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Seventeen years after Rhoades defined preferential segregation, ![]()
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The phenomenon of meiotic drive refers to the situation in which one member of a pair of homologs is preferentially recovered in the progeny of a heterozygote. Such a situation will dramatically alter allele frequencies in a population, thereby affecting the evolution of the genome and the species by means independent of allele fitness. ![]()
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| Ab10 and preferential segregation today |
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Maize knobs were among the first loci to draw the attention of plant molecular biologists. The laboratory of Jim Peacock in Canberra, Australia, cloned a 180-bp repeat that is present in most knobs and especially on Ab10 (![]()
Rhoades viewed neocentromeres as a form of centromere and was particularly interested in how they move on the spindle (![]()
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Rhoades and his students also took a strong interest in dissecting the various functions associated with Ab10, using deficiencies affecting the size of the knob (![]()
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A surprising discovery from recent deficiency studies was the demonstration that there are two independent neocentromere "systems" on Ab10 (![]()
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Ab10 has also piqued the interest of evolutionary biologists. As an example of meiotic drive, one must wonder why Ab10 and the knobs it affects have not been swept to fixation in maize and teosinte populations. Despite being under meiotic drive, Ab10 has an average frequency of only 14% in those teosinte populations in which it occurs, and the knobs remain similarly polymorphic in the presence of Ab10. ![]()
Another recent development is a meiotic-drive-based model for the rapid evolution of centromeric repeats (![]()
No hypothesis could have predicted the behavior of abnormal chromosome 10 and the phenomenon of preferential segregation/meiotic drive. It required a mind open to the unusual, a strict adherence to the facts over dogma, and, once discovered, rigorous hypothesis testing to define the details. For Rhoades, the framework of facts became the model. Much remains to be learned about what makes a centromere, a neocentromere, and the role of meiotic drive in shaping the genome. The answers to these questions will be found by emulating Rhoades's spirit of discovery, his dogged persistence, and his intellectual honesty and by heeding his advice to "Just get in the lab and start to work."
| ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |
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The authors thank Ed Coe, Drew Schwartz, John Mottinger, Susan Gabay-Laughnan, Kathleen Newton, and Ellen Dempsey for sharing their recollections, and Inna Golubovskaya for sharing her unpublished observations. We thank E. Coe, E. Dempsey, S. Gabay-Laughnan, Lee Kass, and D. Schwartz for comments on the manuscript. Ellen Dempsey provided the photos of Rhoades and neocentromeres in meiosis. Susan Gabay-Laughnan provided the photo of the Illinois maize genetics group.
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