Sunday 19 January 2014

Swedish lady-professors: how they do mutants.

Keeping blind eyes on huge spores


In Sweden the tree of feminism is such over-fertilized that it starts producing ugly fruits. In science it is notable the most. Women are fiercely promoted to become professors. Intellectual capacity and talent are not really important. So, the results look (i) ridiculously and (ii) abusively to all normal representatives of the female half of humanity. In the next few posts I’ll give some examples.


Someone might think that the Department of Forest Mycology and Plant Pathology is an unfortunate exception from otherwise exemplary university.  One department is not an indicator of low competence of the whole university. I thought the same. However, the Department of Forest Mycology was the second place in the SLU, where I had a chance to work. My acquaintance with SLU began with a research group from the Department of Plant Biology led by lady-professor D. 
I was given a task to study a sporulation-deficient mutant of a plan pathogenic fungi Verticilium longisporum. As you can see from the name, this mutant fungal strain was unable to produce spores. Before the mutant came into my hands, lady-prof. D’s group has been working with it for quite a long time. 
So, I got two plates: on one was a dark grayish-black fungus (non-mutant, wild type) and on another – white fungus (the mutant form) (pic 1)
 
To mycologists: yes, fungi on my picture don’t look like the true Verticillium, but it was the best I could do lacking the drawing talent.
Pic. 1


Work started with transferring fungi on new plates. On this step strange things happened: plates with mutant strain were covered with small white dots. Hmm… I never grew fungi before, always worked with bacteria. But these white sports looked like fungal mycelium growing from a single spore. (pic 2)


Pic. 2

At that time I spent only few weeks at Sweden and I was 100% sure that at Swedish labs only the high-level experts work. So, if they told me that this was the sporeless mutant that means it was a sporeless mutant and it simple must not have spores. By the other hand, I was taught not to ignore the facts and facts in a form of white dots were growing all over the plates with supposed sporulation-deficient mutant. Hmmm… I showed strange fungi to lady-prof. D. She said with disgust: “Contamination!” (damn foreigners simple can’t work well enough).
Ok! I repeated the procedure with all possible precautions and made few control plates to check for contamination. All control petri dishes were clean, but plates with sporulation-deficient mutant were covered with snowballs again. We had another meeting with lady-professor, and she again confidently talked about contamination. 
Finally I asked one mycologist to look at white mutant under the microscope. He found that supposed sporeless mutant was entirely covered with huge well-developed spores. He said:” O! Such nice spores! What kind of fungi is it?” I said:” Sporulation-deficient Verticilium mutant” He immediately understood who the owner of these fungi was and that the news about high prolificacy of presumably sterile fungi would made terrible woman seriously unhappy. So he started babbling that he is not quite sure and it would be better if I consult someone else. Seeing so much fear in his eyes, I promised not mention his name to the terrible lady-professor.
On the next day  lady-professor's eyes flashed with anger, when I told her that the beloved sporeless mutant was actually the melanin-deficient one (pic. 3). Fungi just lacked the pigment (were albinos). 


Pic. 3
Lady-professor gritted her teeth and gave me another task, which happened to be even more amusing! 
I must say, that technicians in that department were brilliant. Then, it is even more puzzled how such things could happen. The only explanation I have is that lady-professor was as overweening as she was incompetent and being so she never paid attention to the opinion of the lab personnel.
Now think! If in the well-equipped lab, which for decades worked with the same fungi, people could not distinguish between spore-less and spore-white mutants, then how many potentially dangerous mutants did they produce? How many potentially dangerous forms did they fail to detect? By the way, they were all released to the Nature... 
Good Luck for the mankind is that this lady-professor worked with plant not human pathogens!