BMB 491 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Pentose, Deoxyribose, Cytosine
1 May 2022
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Scientists routinely manipulate dna in the laboratory, often to change the heritable traits of cells in their experiments. Until the 1940s, the case for proteins seemed stronger: biochemists had identified proteins as a class of macromolecules with great heterogeneity and specificity of function, essential requirements for the hereditary material. Little was known about nucleic acids, whose physical and chemical properties seemed far too uniform. This view gradually changed as the role of dna in heredity was worked out in studies of bacteria and the viruses that infect them, A virus is little more than dna (or sometimes rna) enclosed by a protective coat, which is often simply protein. To produce more viruses, a virus must infect a cell and take over the cell"s metabolic machinery. The hershey-chase experiment was a landmark study because it provided powerful evidence that nucleic acids, rather than proteins, are the hereditary material, at least for certain viruses.
