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Friederich Miescher isolated the genetic material from white blood cell nuclei. He named it nuclein.
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Phoebus Levene Discovered the components of DNA, these being: adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine and deoxyribose phosphate.
He defined phosphate-sugar-base units called nucleotides. -
Levene thought that there were four nucleotides per molecule. Levene thought that phosphoester was the one to bound the nucleotides.
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He studied the epidemiology and pathology of 2 strains of streptococco and he observed the first widely accepted demonstrations of bacterial transformation.
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Determined the cause of the transformation in Griffith's Experiment
They took live R and heat-treated S and mixed it with one of two enzymes:
a protease (destroys protein)
a DNAse (destroys DNA) -
Watson and Crick wrote a paper in which they described DNA as a double helix with sugars and phosphates at the center and the nucleobases facing the outside
This model was quickly shown to be incorrect and in fact it made no chemical sense -
Erwin Chargaff used paper chromatography and UV spectroscopy to count the nucleobases and studied the percentages of Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine and Guanine that there were.He noticed a very strange thing that was named the Chargaff rules. Chargaff's rules stated that the amount of Adenine was equal to the amount of Thymine and that the amount of Cytosine was equal to the amount of Guanine. These rules apply to all species, with no exceptions.
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The Hershey-Chase experiments concluded that DNA, was the genetic material, and not protein.
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Rosalind Franklin takes a picture that shows clearly that the structure of DNA is a double Helix.The photo is stolen by Maurice Wilkins and delivered to Crick and Watson.
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Linus Pauling and Robert Corey presented the triple helix as the structure of the DNA, but they were incorrect.
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After seeing Photo 51, Watson and Crick realise their previous model was inside out.
They built the model based on Rosalind's photo and finally confirmed that that was the structure of DNA. -
Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins ended up winning the Nobel prize for their discoveries, but Rosalind died from Ovarian cancer due to the exposure to the X rays and wasn't given the prize, since Nobel prizes are only awarded to living persons.
Sadly none of them acknowledged the importance of her work in their discovery and they were the ones that got famous and got all the credit.