Did Demerec discover intragenic recombination in 1928?

Abstract

STURTEVANT'S multiple allelism hypothesis (Sturtevant 1913) led to the assumption by geneticists during much of the first half of the twentieth century that genes were units indivisible by recombination (reviewed in Lipshitz 2004, pp. 13–18). Disproof of this hypothesis required the discovery of the cis-trans position effect in Drosophila and the recovery of both wild-type and double-mutant recombinants from flies heterozygous for the Star and asteroid rough-eye mutations (Lewis 1942, 1945). A decade later, fine-structure mapping of the rII locus in phage provided definitive proof of intragenic recombination (Benzer 1955). In fact, Oliver (1940) had reported the occurrence of wild-type flies from females heterozygous for the mutations of the lozenge rough-eye series. He interpreted these as revertants, as the title of his article indicates, but he does discuss the possibility that they were the result of recombination. Green and Green (1949) later obtained double and even triple lozenge mutant combinations, thus establishing recombination as the source of the wild-type flies that Oliver had discovered.

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