Streptococcus pneumoniae caused an epidemic disease that took the lives of many people during the 1920s. A bacteriologist by the name of Frederick Griffith, sought to study the virulence of this organism and the development of a vaccine against it. His research focused on why some strains of S. pneumoniae caused the disease (virulent) and other strains did not (non-virulent). For this reason, he began to carry out experiments with different combinations of virulent vs non virulent and live vs dead strains. In his experiments, he showed that a virulent strain was able to transfer information to a benign strain and transform it into a virulent strain through what he called a “transforming factor”. Although Griffith did not know about the chemical and biological processes that were involved in the transformation process, these results were the beginning of what would later be key for the discovery of the horizontal gene transfer.
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