Abstract
The research group of Professor Andrey Belozersky with whom I started my academic career in 1955 consisted of two parts: one was located at the Department of Plant Biochemistry, Moscow State University, and the other at the A. N. Bach Institute of Biochemistry, Academy of Sciences of the USSR. This biochemical group was one of the most creative in the country. It was world-renowned because of several important discoveries in the field of nucleic acid studies. In the thirties of the last century, it succeeded in settling the question of the universal occurrence of two known types of nucleic acids, ribonucleic acid (RNA) and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), in living matter. At that time, many biochemists believed that RNA is a characteristic component of plants and fungi, whereas DNA (designated as “thymonucleic acid” or “animal nucleic acid”) belongs to the animal kingdom. The presence of DNA in plant cells raised doubts, as the positive cytochemical Feulgen reaction in plant cell nuclei was the only indirect evidence. Belozersky and colleagues were the first to isolate thymine and then DNA (thymonucleic acid) from higher plants (1, 2), thus proving the universal occurrence of DNA. The next series of studies was carried out on bacteria (3) and demonstrated that both RNA and DNA were present there, again confirming the idea of the universality of the occurrence of both types of nucleic acids in organisms of different phylogenetic kingdoms. At the same time, the studies on bacteria showed that these organisms were deserving of special attention because of the high content of nucleic acids in their cells. During the years from 1939 to 1947, the systematic studies of the content of nucleic acids in bacteria of various taxonomic families, of different ages, and under different physiological conditions were performed in both subgroups headed by Belozersky (4). The high level of nucleic acids in cells was postulated to be in direct relation to their biological activities, growth rate, and cell proliferation.
Highlights
I joined the group in 1954 as a graduate student, formally at the Institute of Biochemistry of the Academy of Sciences, but the place of my experimental work was in the well equipped new building of the Biological Faculty at the Moscow State University
REFLECTIONS: Ribosome as a Conveying Thermal Ratchet Machine gene-specific) ribonucleic acid (RNA) exists at the background of the main mass of evolutionarily conserved RNA, which consists for the most part of ribosomal RNA
The diversity of base composition found in the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) of different bacterial species is not reflected in the base composition of ribosomal RNA (Belozersky and Spirin, 1960)
Summary
Our results were the first indications that only a small fraction of total RNA of normal (non-infected) cells copies DNA (genes) and, could be supposed to play the role of messenger (as such an RNA was named by Jacob and Monod [19]) from DNA to proteins (i.e. to be a coding RNA). Vasiliev and associates showed that electron microscopy images of two species of isolated ribosomal RNA (16 S and 23 S) in the compactly folded state are different in their shapes and strongly resemble the images of isolated 30 S and 50 S ribosomal subunits, respectively [39, 40] This led us to boldly assert that the specific shape and gross structure of ribosomal particles are determined by self-folding of their high-polymer ribosomal RNAs [41]. Meselson [50]. (It is noteworthy that 3 years before, preliminary results on the in vitro assembly of ribosome-like particles from ribosomal RNA-containing “CM-particles” and cell lysate proteins were obtained and reported at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium [51].)
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