Abstract
After Miescher's discovery of nucleic acid, biochemical research on nucleic acid focused on determining its chemical structure. Nucleic acid purified from calf thymus was composed of one part sugar, one part phosphoric acid, and approximately one-fourth part of each of the nitrogen bases, adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. When the sugar was shown to be deoxyribose, thymus nucleic acid was referred to as deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA for short. The biochemist Chargaff showed that the base composition of DNA is characteristic of the species. For all DNA samples, the amount of adenine equals the amount of thymine (A = T) and guanine equals cytosine (G = C).
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