BIOL 1101 Chapter 13: Chapter 13
Document Summary
He studied alkaptonuria, a human disease that does little harm but is detected easily by the fact that a patients urine turns black when exposed to oxygen. Garrod and william bateson, a geneticists, studied families of patients with the disease and concluded that it is an inherited trait. He also found that people with it excrete a particular compound, homogentisic acid, in their urine. He concluded that normal people are able to metabolize the homogentisic acid, whereas people with this disease cannot. By 1908, he concluded that the disease was an inborn error of metabolism. In the second piece of research, george. Beadle and edward tatum, working in the 1940s with the orange bread mould neurospora crassa, collected data showing a direct relationship between genes and enzymes. Beadle and tatum chose neurospora for their work because it is a haploid fungus with simple nutritional needs.