Ron Konopka

Ronald J. Konopka (1947-2015) was an American geneticist who studied chronobiology. He made his most notable contribution to the field while working with Drosophila in the lab of Seymour Benzer at the California Institute of Technology. During this work, Konopka discovered the period (per) gene, which controls the period of circadian rhythms.

Ron Konopka received his Ph.D. in Biology from the California Institute of Technology in 1972. In 1975, following his discovery of the period mutants, Konopka was awarded a faculty position at the California Institute of Technology. While there, Konopka's colleagues were critical of his reluctance to publish his work on the period gene, and Konopka was denied tenure. After his stay at Caltech, Konopka accepted a position at Clarkson University but was again denied tenure and subsequently exited the field of science. Konopka's career, interwoven with the work of his mentor, Seymour Benzer, and the other scientists working in Benzer's lab is narrated in Time, Love, Memory by Jonathan Weiner.

As a graduate student in Seymour Benzer's lab, Konopka sought to use Benzer's method of behavioral genetics to unravel the mysteries of the "master clock" that existed in every organism. He used ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS) to induce point mutations in the Drosophila melanogaster genome, and eventually isolated three mutants with abnormal rhythms in eclosion. He mapped the mutations to the same location on the far left of the X chromosome, less than 1 centimorgan away from the white gene locus. These mutations were alternative alleles of a gene that Konopka subsequently named period. While wild type flies have a circadian period around 24 hours, Konopka found the per⁰¹ mutant was arrhythmic, the per^S mutant had a period of 19 hours, and the per^L had a period of 29 hours.

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