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DNA, Fifty Years To the Day
An anonymous reader writes "Today being the fiftieth anniversary (April 2, 1953) of the Watson-Crick double-helical, DNA discovery [to quote, 'We wish to put forward a radically different structure...'], there is an interesting tally of completed gene sequences here, and ones still being worked, including the Ames strain of the anthrax bacteria. It also appears that the only lifeforms not using DNA for code storage are a few viruses like the common cold."
Let's not forget Rosalind Franklin - the woman who actually took the X-ray photographs of the DNA molecule. Without her, Watson and Crick would not have been able to discern the DNA structure!
Click here for video of the anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA. This was taped at Cold Springs Harbor Lab, where Watson is currently the director. Also, you can find their original paper that was published in Nature annoucing the discovery. It's interesting to note that since their discovery of DNA's double-helical structure, neither Watson nor Crick have discovered or published anything significant since then.
If you've not read it, The Double Helix is a great book that discusses the discovery from Watson's perspective. He covers his, Franklin's, Crick's, and Linus Paulings's involvement in a very interesting story. It's a short book, and well worth your time.
Watson rips on Franlin pretty hard in the book, but mainly because of personality conflicts. He acknowledges in the end that without her contributions, they wouldn't have achieved the same success.
...they only described it's structure. The discovery of DNA goes back to at least 1929, possibly earlier (depending on which discovery you're looking for.)
1865 - Gregor Mendel shows that heredity is passed in discreet units
1900 - Three scientists independently verify Mendel's work, and formulate the laws of heredity
1909 - Willhelm Johannsen coins the term gene
1911 - Thomas Hunt Morgan shows that chromosomes contain genes
1929 - Phoebus Levin discovers that genes are made up of nucleotides (i.e., genes are made up of DNA)
1943 - William Astbury obtains first X-ray diffraction pictures of DNA
1951 - Rosalind Franklin's X-ray diffraction images show DNA has two different forms, and that it takes the form of a helix
1953 - Watson and Crick formulate their model
Here's a lot more of the story of her work:
Book Talk on "The Dark Lady of DNA..."
[Broadcast on Saturday 29 March 2003]
Listen via Audio on Demand from:
www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/booktalk/audio/booktalk_29
Brenda Maddox on why the young English biophysicist Rosalind Franklin was never to know how vital her own work was to Francis Crick and James Watson's discovery of 'the secret of life.'
The biographer of D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats and Nora Barnacle, James Joyce's wife, Brenda Maddox talks about her life of Rosalind Franklin at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature.
See also:
"The Dark Lady Of DNA"
Author: Brenda Maddox/Rosalind Franklin
Publisher: Harpercollins
Viruses are 'particles' that cannot replicate on their own. They contain genetic material, in the form of either DNA or RNA and this genetic material encodes for proteins important for the life cycle of the virus. When a virus infects a cell, it takes over the host cell machinary to manufacture more viruses. Very few viruses are naked strands of genetic material (DNA or RNA), often they are housed in cages of protein and may or may not have membranes (which they will have stolen from the host cell as they bud out of various host cell membranes).
Except that the link posted in the post is for microbial genomes only. There are a lot of other genomes that have sequenced. NCBI is better place to look for this info.
m e
Here is the *definitive* page for completed genomes:
http://www.ncbi.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=Geno
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
Influenza, measles, mumps and polio are all RNA based viruses.
DNA viruses include herpes and hepatitis. I think HIV is a DNA type but I don't recall offhand.
--- Ban humanity.
DNA is credited to the inception of genetic algorithms. The main idea behind genetic algorithms is the emulatation of natural selection and evolution by means of DNA manipulation. This is accomplished by many DNA manipulation techniques; the two most prominent are crossover, where two different chromosomes swap DNA information, and genetic mutation, where a random [DNA] bit is rotated. If you're interested in genetic algorithms, check out this introduction.
/joeyo
2^5
Gene therapy is NOT a standard treatment for anything. It is still experimental and has been shut down completely two or three times in the last decade because of unexpected deaths of patients. The only success of gene therapy to date has been a French study in which 9 children with SCID (Severe Combined Immune Deficiency) were succesfully treated with gene therapy. Even this study has been halted for now because two of the patients have developed leukemia-like symptoms.
Doubtless gene therapy has great promise, but it will be decades before it is a standard treatment.
And who knows, maybe he is a bit more informed about DNA than the originating poster. While a lot of viruses and retroviruses have RNA making up their genome, a lot do in fact have single or double-stranded DNA.