Leonard La Cour

He was born on 28 July 1907 in the Borough of Lambeth, south London, to Maude (née Coomber) and Francis Lacour, both of whom worked at Buckingham Palace.

His father, a chef, died when he was an infant, and his mother remarried and moved to the Isle of Bute; he was brought up by his grandmother at Merton Park in Surrey.

He improved on the formulation of existing fixatives, developing three new ones that were widely used until the embedding and sectioning method of preparing samples was abandoned in favour of the squash technique.

In the late 1930s La Cour started to research whether different treatments of the growing plant before taking samples affected the appearance of the chromosomal preparations.

[1] La Cour continued to research cold-induced light staining in chromosomes in Trillium and other species in work published in 1951, showing that these regions were usually found near the centromere, in plants and animals including Amblystoma mexicanum.

Working alone, La Cour found that Hyacinthus cells with an additional nucleolus were more resistant to X-ray damage, and demonstrated that Luzula chromosomes were unusual in having multiple separate centromeres, termed "polycentric".

They used a durum wheat strain unable to pair its chromosomes to dissect the role of different parts of the synaptonemal complex, revealing that the mutant did not form cross fibrils.

Later, in Phaedranassa viridiflora pollen mother cells, they observed two strands of 3.0–3.5 nm after disrupting the central core of the synaptonemal complex, hypothesising that these represented the "chromosome axes".

"[7] Irene Manton, however, in a more-balanced review for Nature, considered that it was positioned between the needs of inexperienced and expert researchers, but that there was a "solid core of real value" as an "introductory reference to some interesting, new and useful laboratory methods.