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More on the History of TMV
I wish to comment on the interesting article on the contributions of tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) to virology by Milton Zaitlin in the October 1999 ASM News, p. 675-680. As a virologist who participated in the work of Wendell Stanley's laboratory in the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton in the early 1940s, I thought some additional results of those studies ought to be noted. Max Lauffer, the physical chemist of the laboratory, characterized the molecular weight and size of the monomeric virus particle, and his results were in agreement with the dimensions subsequently established by electron microscopy. This helped to set the microscopic image of TMV as a standard in exploring the dimensions of other viruses. Howard Schachman developed the use of the Sharples centrifuge in the isolation of TMV, and this was applied to the isolation of influenza virus for purposes of vaccine production. In 1942, the RNA of TMV was the first RNA to be demonstrated to be much larger than a tetranucleotide.
The Stanley laboratory, like other plant virus laboratories in the 1930s and 1940s, had focused on the problems of the structure of the virus particle and its components. It was not evident at the time how the concept of virus disease as cellular disease could be explored in plant systems. That cellular infection could be studied with bacterial viruses became clear almost concurrently in the early 1940s. The isolation of plant protoplasts by I. Takebe in 1968 and their subsequent infection or the study of infected protoplasts derived from infected plants demonstrated that the multiplication of TMV and other plant viruses could be analyzed in separated cells as in biochemical studies of the multiplication of phage or animal viruses.
Seymour S. Cohen
10 Carrot Hill Road
Woods Hole, Mass.
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