Neurospora at the millennium.

This is an opportune time to evaluate the contributions of Neurospora to genetics and biology in the recent past and to anticipate what its role might be in the years ahead. The turn of the century marks the 75th anniversary of the first genetic experiments with Neurospora. Although hisorical accounts of Neurospora genetics usually begin with the 1941 paper of Beadle and Tatum, genetic analysis had in fact been initiated 16 years earlier by B. O. Dodge (see Robbins, 1962). It was Dodge who identified the two mating types and used them to demonstrate Mendelian segregation in individual asci. Dodge quickly recognized the potentialities of the organism for genetic research. His enthusiasm was largely responsible for the adoption of Neurospora by geneticists and for its development as a model organism. Now, 75 years after Dodge’s identification of the first gene, over 1000 loci have been characterized and mapped in the seven linkage groups (Perkins et al., 2000). Within a few years of Beadle and Tatum’s initial work, and in large part because of it, many prokaryotic microbial models emerged in molecular genetics. These include Escherichia coli and Salmonella, together with the T series f virulent bacteriophages and the temperate phages P22, 1, and l. Many of their attributes made them more