ArticleJournal of the history of biology2014
Making a Virus Visible: Francis O. Holmes and a biological assay for tobacco mosaic virus.
Article in Journal of the history of biology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Review
- FromBiomolecules · 2022Review
- Practicing virology: making and knowing a mid-twentieth century experiment with Tobacco mosaic virus.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2022Article
- Transcriptional Regulatory Networks Associate with Early Stages of Potato Virus X Infection ofInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2021Article
- Plant immune responses against viruses: how does a virus cause disease?The Plant cell · 2013Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In the early twentieth century, viruses had yet to be defined in a material way. Instead, they were known better by what they were not - not bacteria, not culturable, and not visible with a light microscope. As with the ill-defined "gene" of genetics, viruses were microbes whose nature had not been revealed. Some clarity arrived in 1929 when Francis O. Holmes, a scientist at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research (Yonkers, NY) reported that Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) could produce local necrotic lesions on tobacco plants and that these lesions were in proportion to dilutions of the inoculum. Holmes' method, the local lesion assay, provided the first evidence that viruses were discrete infectious particles, thus setting the stage for physicochemical studies of plant viruses. In a field where there are few eponymous methods or diseases, Holmes' assay continues to be a useful tool for the study of plant viruses. TMV was a success because the local lesion assay "made the virus visible" and standardized the work of virology towards determining the nature of the virus.
Indexed as
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.