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Dna Essay

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The beginning of this story can be considered as a joke. “We just opened the secret of life,” – said one of two men, who entered the Eagle pub in Cambridge 64 years ago. Those people did not exaggerated. One of them was Francis Crick, another – James Watson. Watson and Crick discovered structure of deoxyribonucleic acid - a substance that contains all hereditary information. A few months after the historic statement in the pub came a careful publication of the work of two researchers in the journal Nature (Watson and Crick 738-740). The article ended with the assumption that the discovery of the structure of DNA could explain the copying mechanisms of genetic material. With the structure of DNA in hand, molecular biology became the fastest …show more content…

Watson cut out of the cardboard four types of nucleotide models - guanine (G), cytosine (C), thymine (T) and adenine (A) - and began to lay them on the table. He discovered that adenine binds to thymine, and guanine - to cytosine on the principle of "key-lock." It is in this way two strands of DNA are connected together, that is opposite to thymine, one thread will always contain adenine from the other, and nothing else. The two strands of the Watson-Crick model are complementary to each other, so that wherever an adenine appears on one strand, a thymine occurs directly opposite from it in the other strand (Garland 219). Watson and Crick got the Nobel Prize in1958. The discovery of the spatial structure of DNA revolutionized the world of science and led to many new discoveries without which it is impossible to imagine not only modern science, but also modern life as a whole. In 60th another important discovery was made - the genetic code. DNA contains information about everything that is inherited, including the linear structure of each protein in the body. Proteins, like DNA, represent long molecular chains of amino acids. There are 20 amino acids. Accordingly, it was unclear how the "language" of DNA, consisting of a four-letter alphabet, is translated into the "language" of proteins, where 20 "letters". It revealed that the combination of three nucleotides of DNA clearly

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