Abstract
Today, machines turn out the sequence of a million DNA bases in a day. Fifty years ago, when the chemical and biochemical tools for studying DNA and RNA were at best rudimentary, such a machine was unimaginable. Then, the cutting edge was Erwin Chargaff's demonstration, in 1948, that the base composition of DNA could be reliably determined. His discovery that all DNAs contain equal amounts of adenine and thymine and similarly of guanine and cytosine depended on applying two recent developments: partition chromatography and the absorption spectra of nucleic acid constituents.
Highlights
Today, machines turn out the sequence of a million DNA bases in a day
Insights into RNA structure lagged behind, hampering progress in understanding how DNA carries out its genetic function
Progress was slow because of the difficulty of determining whether the internucleotide bond was 5Ј to 3Ј or 5Ј to 2Ј, because the primitive methods available could not cope with the instability of RNA compared with DNA, and because of the still unrecognized existence of several types of RNA
Summary
Machines turn out the sequence of a million DNA bases in a day. Fifty years ago, when the chemical and biochemical tools for studying DNA and RNA were at best rudimentary, such a machine was unimaginable. The impetus for further advances in DNA and RNA biochemistry emerged not from structural investigations but from studies of the enzymology of phosphate-containing coenzymes and nucleotides.
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