Bakerian Lecture: A region of biosynthesis

Abstract

The particular region of biosynthesis about which I propose to speak is that part of the kingdom of living things occupied by the fungi, particularly those fungi popularly known as ‘moulds’, with occasional reference to some higher fungi and also to lichens, which are of course symbionts of algae and fungi. It is, I think, not inappropriate that this should form the subject of a Bakerian Lecture, since the founder of this lecture, Mr Henry Baker, F .R .S ., who was an ardent microscopist, described in 1742 the spores of the fungus Lycorperdon , * the common puff ball(1). In the following year he gave a good description of Pilobolus , a mould of the mucor type, which he found growing on a culture of black mud from the river Thames (2). The exact position of fungi in the scheme of living things is still doubtful, since, to quote Dr John Ramsbottom(3), ‘if organisms must be either plants or animals, then fungi are plants with a nutrition resembling that of animals as they do not possess chlorophyll. If, however, chlorophyll is the hall mark of plant phylogeny the fact has to be faced that fungi probably never possessed it.’ Because of the absence of chlorophyll, fungi can be cultivated only on media containing pre-formed organic matter, but this very fact makes moulds particularly suitable for biochemical investigation, since they grow well on very simple media.