ABSTRACT
In 1843, a luxuriant growth of a pink-orange fungus was observed on bread in the bakeries of Paris. Subsequently this fungus was recognized as a common contaminant of bakeries and it came to be known as the pink bread mold. On September 1, 1923, an earthquake followed by œre struck Tokyo. The strange sight of a pink-orange growth that developed on almost all burnt trees and vegetation amazed the residents. Examination showed that the orange-colored growth was because of the profuse production of conidia by a fungus. The fungus was named Oidium aurantiacus. The name was later changed to Monilia sitophila. In 1927 Shear and Dodge discovered the sexual phase of the fungus in cultures grown in the laboratory and renamed the genus as Neurospora because it produced ascospores with neuron-like striations. Soon after its discovery by B. O. Dodge, who was then working at the New York Botanical Gardens, the ease of manually dissecting out its sexually formed spores under a binocular microscope and growing these into progeny colonies for analysis of phenotypic classes for genetic analysis was recognized. In a letter dated February 27, 1941, George W. Beadle, who was then at Stanford University, wrote to Dodge:
Neurospora is the best studied of all fungi and is regarded as a model of all microbes (Davis and Perkins, 2002). This chapter describes some aspects of its history, lifestyle, attributes, and contributions to biology.
