Creating the Central Dogma from Bread Mold experiments
An old saying goes that “two heads are better than one”, and very often this holds true in great scientific discoveries. In 1941, a geneticist and biochemist joined forces to develop and test a hypothesis that would forever change molecular biology. In 1941, Beadle and Tatum provided the missing link between genetics and molecular biology with their “one-gene-one enzyme hypothesis” experiment. Using the simple bread mold, Neurospora crassa, they were able to perform random mutagenesis and then identify strains that had metabolic defects. They found that most mutants were unable to grow unless their media was supplemented with particular amino acids that they were no longer able to synthesize. They reasoned this was due to the synthesis pathway being interrupted by the mutations, suggesting that the mutations affected only a single metabolic pathway, and thus, the central dogma of one gene: one protein was born.
An old saying goes that “two heads are better than one”, and very often this holds true in great scientific discoveries. In 1941, a geneticist and biochemist joined forces to develop and test a hypothesis that would forever change molecular biology. In 1941, Beadle and Tatum provided the missing link between genetics and molecular biology with their “one-gene-one enzyme hypothesis” experiment. Using the simple bread mold, Neurospora crassa, they were able to perform random mutagenesis and then identify strains that had metabolic defects. They found that most mutants were unable to grow unless their media was supplemented with particular amino acids that they were no longer able to synthesize. They reasoned this was due to the synthesis pathway being interrupted by the mutations, suggesting that the mutations affected only a single metabolic pathway, and thus, the central dogma of one gene: one protein was born.
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