Sergey Petrov – Obituary

On 29 December 1999 the outstanding Russian poultry geneticist Professor Sergey G. Petrov died at the age of 96. He was acknowledged as a famous scholar in the field of poultry genetics as well as bee breeding.

Born on 18 December 1903, Sergey Petrov started his scientific career in the 1920s under the supervision of prominent Russian biologists and geneticists including Professors N.K. Koltsov and A.S. Serebrovsky. At that time he was a researcher in the Poultry Breeding Department headed by Serebrovsky at the Central Genetic Station (CGS), Anikovo/Nazaryevo/Slobodka led by Koltsov. The studies on chicken genetics and major mutations carried out by Serebrovsky, Petrov and other CGS researchers were the first to be done in Russia and contributed to the ‘gold fund’ of the Russian genetic science.

From 1928 to 1929 Petrov took part in a number of expeditions aimed at describing the local chicken populations in the North Ossetia and Volgo-Vyatka regions; these were organised by Serebrovsky and initiated the genogeographical studies in Russia. A number of reports from those expeditions are stored in the Russian Academy of Sciences Archive and have still to be reanalysed.

In the late 1920s and 1930s Petrov wrote a series of papers on chicken genetics, many of them in co-authorship with Serebrovsky. One of these articles (‘The Composition of the Plan of the Chromosomes of the Domestic FowI’, published in 1930 in the Journal of Experimental Biology Series A, Volume 6, Issue 2, pp. 61-72, in Russian) is considered one of the first attempts to summarise the available data on chicken linkage groups. It preceded by six years the paper by F. B. Hutt - a fact overlooked or underestimated by all past and contemporary chicken genome mappers. In this paper Serebrovsky and Petrov presented the first chicken map comprising four linkage groups with 12 genes and four other unlinked genes...