Collection RD - Ray Dixon Collection

Extent: 7 volumes (2 boxes)

Ray Dixon brought the books with the rest of his papers when the Unit of Nitrogen Fixation moved to Colney as the Nitrogen Fixation Laboratory in 1987. They remained in Ray Dixon's office until 2026, when the space was required for repurposing. The books transferred to the library as part of a larger group of around 40 volumes, dating up to the 1990s. In consultation with Professor Dixon, these early volumes were selected as being of particular significance. The remaining volumes were sent for disposal.

The volumes detail experiments conducted by Professor Ray Dixon FRS during his PhD and early postdoctoral period at the ARC Unit of Nitrogen Fixation, University of Sussex. The volumes from 1969-1976 detail the experiments which formed the basis of three papers published in Nature during the 1970s. 1. Dixon, R.A., and Postgate, J.R. (1971). Transfer of nitrogen-fixation genes by conjugation in Klebsiella pneumoniae. Nature 234, 47-48. 2. Dixon, R., and Postgate, J.R. (1972). Genetic transfer of nitrogen fixation from Klebsiella pneumoniae to Escherichia coli. Nature 237, 102-103. 3. Dixon, R., Cannon, F., and Kondorosi, A. (1976). Construction of a P plasmid carrying nitrogen fixation genes from Klebsiella pneumoniae. Nature 260, 268-271. Publication 2 is particularly notable, because it reported the first transfer of an entire nif gene cluster into an organism that does not fix nitrogen, thus engineering the first synthetic diazotroph. This work was conducted prior to the advent of recombinant DNA technology and has been highly cited. Publication 3 was also a landmark in the field, as it reported the engineering of a plasmid that enabled genetic characterisation and cloning of nitrogen fixation genes. It has formed the basis of many recent synthetic biology advances, including the engineering of nitrogenase components in plant mitochondria. Most volumes are organised chronologically, but the first volume is arranged into sections, which group details of methods used, and individual experiments separately.

; Physical Description: 7 volumes (6 notebooks and 1 folder of loose leaf)

Admin History: Professor Raymond Alan Dixon FRS (b.1947) is a British microbiologist. Educated at University of Reading (BSc) and University of Sussex (PhD), he went on to work in the ARC Unit of Nitrogen Fixation at Sussex. He remained with the organisation when it moved to Colney in 1987 as the Nitrogen Fixation Laboratory, and transferred to the John Innes Centre when the NFL merged with other organisations in 1994. Dixon remains an Emeritus Professor at the John Innes Centre, where his research focuses on molecular understanding of biological nitrogen fixation in bacteria and its regulation in response to environmental cues.