BIO152H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 15: Arginine, Metabolic Pathway, George Gamow
Document Summary
In cells, information flows from dna to rna to proteins. Dna is transcribed by rna polymerase to messenger rna, and then messenger rna is translated by ribosomes to proteins. Each amino acid in a protein is specified by a group of three bases in rna. Early advances showed that genes carry the instructions for making and maintaining an individual. In order to infer what a particular gene does, george beadle and edward tatum damaged the gene in the bread mold neurospora crassa, creating a knock-out mutant. They then observed the effect this had on the phenotype of the mutant. The idea was to knock out a gene by damaging it and then infer what the genes does by observing the phenotype of the mutant individual. Out of this work came their one-gene, one-enzyme hypothesis, which proposed that genes contain the information needed to make proteins, many of which function as enzymes.
