Giuseppe Bertani (October 23, 1923–April 7, 2015) was a microbial geneticist who did work with Drosophila melanogaster, mutation rates in E. coli, and spent most of his career working with phages, specifically phage P2.
Bertani created Lysogeny broth, also known as Luria-Bertani medium or Lennox Broth.[1]
In 1948, around the time Bertani turned 25 years old, he immigrated to the United states as Carnegie Fellow. He was invited to work in a group with Milislav Demeric. He quickly shifted from his work in Drosophila genetics to become a pioneer in the field of microbial genetics. Through this network he eventually met Salvador Luria, a professor at Indiana university, and joined him as a research associate. It was here that he requested Luria to give him the opportunity to study lysogeny. He was provided with lysogenic E. coli Lisbonne strain and a Shigella strain. Using these, he was able to show that the production of phages by a lysogen was discontinuous and involved rare, large bursts of phage. His further studies into the Lisbonne strain of E. coli's Phages led him to develop the LB medium.[3]
Discovery of host control variation
In 1953, Bertani was one of the first scientist to describe host controlled variation along side his colleague Salvador Luria. He showed evidence for it with experiments with two different variations of virus, and once he had passed the viruses through a host it would change the selectivity making it almost impossible for one of the two original variations to grow and spread. It is a process that does not involve mutation and selection. Bertani assumed that a phage existed that was almost entirely based on the host and was used in replication that created these host control variations.[4]
