From Petri Plates to Petri Nets, a revolution in yeast biology.

Abstract

The 30th of January, 1991 found me outside Temple Underground Station on the Thames Embankment in London. John Sgouros of the Martinsried Institute for Protein Sciences, who had flown over from Munich that morning, emerged from the station carrying seven A0 sheets in a roll. They were copies of Figure 1 for the paper “The complete DNA sequence of yeast chromosome III”, for which we were determined to get a 1991 submission date. We walked around the corner to the Nature offices in Little Essex Street and handed in these giant Figures together with envelopes containing the manuscript and the other Figures, which I had brought down from Manchester. Nature then lost the copies of Figure 1 but, by 27th March1992, the paper was accepted and appeared in the journal on the 7th of May 1992 (Oliver et al., 1992). This paper reported the first complete DNA sequence of a chromosome from any organism and, with it, everything changed – certainly for me, for yeast genetics, but also for the wider biomedical research community’s view of the value of genome sequencing. The complete sequence of this chromosome taught us some important lessons in two major areas.