BIOLOGY 1A03 Study Guide - Final Guide: Franklin Stahl, Matthew Meselson, Semiconservative Replication

• School: McMaster University
• Department: Biology
• Course: BIOLOGY 1A03
• Professor: Alastair Tracey Rosa Da Silva

Document Summary

Dna is the macromolecule that determines the characteristics of the cell. We know from the early pioneering work of francis crick, james watson and rosalind franklin, that the molecule exists in a helical structure with purines paired with pyrimidines along the entire dna helix. While the hydrogen bonds that form between base pairing of nucleotides renders the dna molecule a certain stability, researchers came to suspect very early on that there must be a copying mechanism for this genetic material. Dna should allow for a mechanism by which the genetic information in dna could be copied. The knowledge that there could be a copying mechanism of dna initiated a scientific revolution that has led to many advances in cellular and molecular biology research. In a follow-up 1954 paper by watson and crick, they proposed a hypothesis for how dna replicates.