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Today I am referencing again Tatuo Aida, 1921, Genetics 6. Title "On the Inheritance of Color in a Fresh-Water Fish, APLOCHEILUS LATIPES". https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200522/pdf/554.pdf
This is a landmark study because it is the first observation that the sex chromosomes do perform some crossing over - bringing in the concept of pseudoautosomal regions and eventually an appreciation that sex chromosomes start out as "just" normal chromosomes;
We now know that hetreogametic sex (where sex is determined by chromosomal content) recurs across evolution, and each time it is about an allele which makes the carrier nearly always (eventually always) one sex, either male (small gametes) or female (large gametes)
It is an interesting piece of science where a genetic observation triggers a deep evolutionary insight into the evolution of a common place but actually very complex world, namely sex dimorphisms. It is also an interesting paper for me for three other reasons.
1. It is written in the era before we knew that DNA was the carrier of inherited information; but we knew about genetics, Mendel's laws - much of what we do now does not *need* an understanding of the mechanism for us to understand the outcome - similar to Tatuo Aida in 1921
Indeed, the paper feels modern to me, and I rather expect Tatuo to open the next paragraph with "and so, we performed a genomewide association study on the phenotype using next generation sequencing" - except he couldnt of course!
2. It is from Japan in 1921; in fact, the data was collected before the 1st World War. One has to remember the history of this time that published science was very much a European and American endeavour.
For an outsider from Japan to write an article in English, send it in, be recieved, and even have this nice editorial comment at the end shows the international nature of science at the time in a time without internet or trans-Pacific travel. Amazing to think about.
(Japanese historians - history of science - better than me where I am just an interested observer might also comment on how this is linked to the Meiji restoration and the rise of Japan's technology and science ambition at the end of the 19th Century).
3. This study was on Medaka fish (the latin name has now changed to Oryzias latipes) - Japanese rice paddy fish though it is present across East asia (much debate on hybrisation and others). It is a fish I have come to love as a scientist.
Why? Well it is tidy and well behaved - you can keep it in tanks and laboratories easily (as millions of Japanese school children know - Medaka fish often have the same role as chicks in introduce children to animal life cycles); it has a tidy, quite small, genome, but uniquely>>
Uniquely for vertebrates, there is an inbreeding protocol from the wild - one can take wild individuals and brother-sister mate them until they are homozygous. This is successful in around 50% of attempts (in contrast inbreeding from the wild for most other vertebrates is ~1%)
My collaborator Felix Loosli Karlsruhr Institute of Technology along with @WittbrodtLab + @Naruse_kiyoshi has done this for a panel of wild Medaka fish from a single location - the MIKK Panel.
It is as if we have captured "Framingham" genetics in a reproducible way, and can recreate our (fish) Framingham population with precisely the same genetics again and again - simply remeasuring phenotypes or changing the environment in systematic ways.
I really wish Tatuo Aida could see this; born in Kyoto in 1871, he performed his work in his garden with freshwater canels that he diverted to keep tanks, with research blending with his teaching responsibilities at the technical school and a Buddist school.
His obituary in Science in 1958 states "he had the well controlled temperament of a Samurai" and that on his death bed he left extensive breeding notes that could be written up. He never got a degree, despite being awarded the Japanese Academy Prize in 1932.
He was born at the start of the Meiji restoration - his parents would have been brought up under the Tokugawa shogunate in "closed" Japan of that time. What changes he must have seen - what a remarkably time to live through.
I hope he would be quietly proud that someone half the world away to cite his work 100 years later, and that his beloved, elegant Medaka fish from Japan are still shedding light on how life works.
