Mikhail Semyonovich Tsvet (Михаил Семёнович Цвет, also spelled Tsvett, Tswett, Tswet, Zwet, and Cvet; 14 May 1872 – 26 June 1919) was a Russian-Italian
botanist
Botany, also called , plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. A botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist who specialises in this field. The term "botany" comes from the Ancient Greek wo ...
who invented
chromatography. His
last name is Russian for "colour" and is also the root word of "
flower."
Biography
Mikhail Tsvet was born 14 May 1872 in
Asti
Asti ( , , ; pms, Ast ) is a ''comune'' of 74,348 inhabitants (1-1-2021) located in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy, about east of Turin in the plain of the Tanaro River. It is the capital of the province of Asti and it is deemed t ...
, Italy. His mother was Italian, and his father was a Russian official. His mother died soon after his birth, and he was raised in
Geneva, Switzerland. He received his
BS degree from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at the
University of Geneva in 1893. However, he decided to dedicate himself to
botany and received his PhD degree in 1896 for his work on
cell physiology. He moved to
Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 1896 because his father was recalled from the foreign service. There he started to work at the Biological Laboratory of the
Russian Academy of Sciences. His Geneva degrees were not recognized in Russia, and he had to earn Russian degrees. In 1897 he became a teacher of botany courses for women. In 1902 he became a laboratory assistant at the Institute of Plant Physiology of the
Warsaw University (now in Poland). In 1903 he became an assistant professor and taught also at other Warsaw universities. After the beginning of
World War I the
Warsaw University of Technology was evacuated to Moscow, Russia, and in 1916 again to
Gorki near Moscow. In 1917 he became a Professor of Botany and the director of the
botanical gardens at the
University of Tartu (Yuryev) (now in
Estonia). In 1918 when German troops occupied the city, the university was evacuated to
Voronezh, a large city in the south of
Central Russia. Tsvet died of a chronic inflammation of the throat on 26 June 1919 at the age of 47.
Chromatography
Mikhail Tsvet invented chromatography in 1900 during his research on plant
pigments. He used liquid-adsorption
column chromatography with
calcium carbonate as
adsorbent and
petrol ether
Petroleum ether is the petroleum fraction consisting of aliphatic hydrocarbons and boiling in the range 35–60 °C, and commonly used as a laboratory solvent. Despite the name, petroleum ether is not classified as an ether; the term is used ...
/
ethanol mixtures as
eluent to separate
chlorophyll
Chlorophyll (also chlorophyl) is any of several related green pigments found in cyanobacteria and in the chloroplasts of algae and plants. Its name is derived from the Greek words , ("pale green") and , ("leaf"). Chlorophyll allow plants to a ...
s and
carotenoid
Carotenoids (), also called tetraterpenoids, are yellow, orange, and red organic compound, organic pigments that are produced by plants and algae, as well as several bacteria, and Fungus, fungi. Carotenoids give the characteristic color to pumpki ...
s. The method was described on 30 December 1901 at the XI Congress of Naturalists and Physicians (XI съезд естествоиспытателей и врачей) in St. Petersburg. The first printed description was in 1905, in the ''Proceedings of the Warsaw Society of Naturalists, biology section''. He first used the term "chromatography" in print in 1906 in his two papers about chlorophyll in the German botanical journal, ''Berichte der Deutschen botanischen Gesellschaft''. In 1907 he demonstrated his chromatograph for the German Botanical Society.
For several reasons, Tsvet's work was long ignored: the violent political upheaval in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, the fact that Tsvet originally published only in Russian (making his results largely inaccessible to western scientists), and an article denying Tsvet's findings.
Richard Willstätter and
Arthur Stoll
Arthur Stoll (8 January 1887 – 13 January 1971) was a Swiss biochemist.
Education and career
The son of a teacher and school headmaster, he studied chemistry at the ETH Zurich, with a PhD in 1911, where he studied with Richard Willstätter. ...
tried to repeat Tsvet's experiments, but because they used an overly aggressive adsorbent (destroying the chlorophyll), were not able to do so. They published their results and Tsvet's chromatography method fell into obscurity. It was revived 10 years after his death thanks to Austrian
biochemist
Biochemists are scientists who are trained in biochemistry. They study chemical processes and chemical transformations in living organisms. Biochemists study DNA, proteins and Cell (biology), cell parts. The word "biochemist" is a portmanteau of ...
Richard Kuhn and his student, German scientist
Edgar Lederer
Edgar is a commonly used English given name, from an Anglo-Saxon name ''Eadgar'' (composed of '' ead'' "rich, prosperous" and ''gar'' "spear").
Like most Anglo-Saxon names, it fell out of use by the later medieval period; it was, however, rev ...
as well as the work of
A. J. Martin
A is the first letter of the Latin and English alphabet.
A may also refer to:
Science and technology Quantities and units
* ''a'', a measure for the attraction between particles in the Van der Waals equation
* ''A'' value, a measure o ...
and
R. L. Synge.
Botanical author abbreviation
The standard
botanical author abbreviation
In botanical nomenclature, author citation is the way of citing the person or group of people who validly published a botanical name, i.e. who first published the name while fulfilling the formal requirements as specified by the ''International Cod ...
Tswett is applied to plants that he described.
References
External links
*
R. Willstätter, A. Stoll, Untersuchungen über Chlorophyll Springer, Berlin (1913)
Biography of Mikhail S. Tsvet(pdf, in German)
Berichte der Deutschen botanischen Gesellschaft 24, 316–323 (1906)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tsvet, Mikhail
1872 births
1919 deaths
19th-century botanists from the Russian Empire
20th-century Russian botanists
People from the Russian Empire of Italian descent
University of Tartu faculty
Inventors from the Russian Empire
Botanists with author abbreviations
Italian emigrants to the Russian Empire
Chromatography