DNA: Time Line of the Discovery of the Structure

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Time Line of the Discovrey of the Structure of DNA is a long process of discovery that culminated in 1953 with the publication by Watson and Crick of their paper.

Prehistory

It was intuitively obvious that the direct descendants of living organisms, especially the offspring of humans, inherited some of their traits of their parents. The process of reproduction of all animals was obvious. It was understood that large seeds, such as acorns, produced a new generation of plants.

Dawn of civilization

Horticulture, animal husbandry and breeding were practiced.

1600

  • 1637: the peak of tulip mania, in the Netherlands in March 1637

1700

  • 1710: The German physician and botanist Rudolf Jakob Camerarius is credited with the first empirical demonstration that plants reproduce sexually.[1]
  • 1780: Antoine Lavoisier, among others, advanced of the science of modern chemistry (the "chemical revolution") around 1780.

1800

  • 1802: John Dalton introduced the modern notion of a simple atomic theory.
  • 1859: Charles Darwin published Origin of the Species, proposing that all species are somehow related.
  • 1866: Gregor Mendel published the basic principles of genetics (specifically on the distribution of non-blending traits among generations of offspring), but his results are ignored for many years.
  • 1869: Friedrich Miescher identified "nuclein", which we know today as deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). It took 50 years for others to recognized the importance of this work.

1900

  • 1900: Mendel's theories are independently rediscovered by Hugo de Vries, Carl Erich Correns and Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg and promoted by William Bateson.
  • 1902: Archibald Edward Garrod published The Incidence of Alkaptonuria: A Study in Chemical Individuality, which associates Mendel's theories with this human disease.[2]
  • 1944: Oswald Avery identified DNA in pneumococcus bacteria as the 'transforming principle'.

1950

  • 1950: Erwin Chargaff published his two rules:
1. That in any double-stranded DNA, the number of guanine units is equal to the number of cytosine units and the number of adenine units is equal to the number of thymine units.
2. that DNA composition is species-specific.
  • 1950: Maurice Wilkins and Raymond Raymond Gosling took the first images of DNA, producing medium-quality pictures of X-ray diffraction in aligned fibres of DNA.[3]
  • 1951: James Watson and Francis Crick start to work together at Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.[4]
  • 1951: Watson and crick propose a 3 Helical model of DNA that is quickly recognized as erroneous.
  • 1951: Rosalind Franklin hired to improve X-ray crystallography quality at Kings.
  • 1952: Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase establish that DNA is responsible for heredity by showing that viral DNA initiates the replication of new viruses.[5]
  • 1952: Rosalind Franklin produced X-ray diffraction photographs of crystallized DNA fibers at King's College, London.
  • May 1952: "Photograph 51" is taken by Rosalind Franklin's PhD student, Raymond Gosling.
  • November (?) 1952: Franklin decides to leave Kings College and announces her decision.
  • December (?) 1962: Linus Pauling proposes a triple stranded Helix structure for DNA

1953

  • January: Wilkins shows Watson "Photo 51".
  • February 21: Watson recognized how the hydrogen bonding between the base pairs occur.[6]
  • April 25: Nature published their Watson and Crick's brief paper.

Afterward

Progress was made over the next decades in understanding the function of DNA.

  • 1958: Crick declares the "central dogma of molecular biology".
  • 1965: Marshall Nirenberg is the first person to sequence the bases in each codon.[7]
  • 1990-2003: the Human Genome Project.
  • May 21, 2010, Science journal reported that the Craig Venter had created Mycoplasma laboratorium, a bacteria that used an existing cell of a Mycoplasma capricolum bacterium with its DNA removed and replaced with fully-synthetic DNA molecule generated from a computer file by based on a modified version of the Mycoplasma mycoides genome.
  • 2013: CRISPR demonstrates fast, cheap and precise DNA editing.

Notes