- What does the 'Svedberg' unit measure, and why is it still used in molecular biology labs today?
Molecular Biology
The molecular basis of biological function and heredity.
- Why did Beadle and Tatum choose bread mould as their experimental organism?
- How did X-ray-induced mutations reveal which gene controlled which metabolic step?
- What does the one gene, one enzyme hypothesis actually claim about how cells work?
- How did this work merge the previously separate fields of genetics and biochemistry?
- How did establishing enzymes as proteins lay groundwork for modern pharmaceutical drug design?
- Why was DNA initially considered too chemically simple a molecule to encode hereditary complexity?
- How did X-ray-induced mutations reveal the link between genes and enzymes?
- What does the one gene, one enzyme hypothesis actually claim about how cells work?
- How many years passed between Beadle's Lasker Award and his Nobel Prize for the same work?
- What modern technologies, from forensic databases to mRNA vaccines, trace their origin back to the double-helix model?
- How did Todd's synthetic chemistry lay groundwork for molecular biology before DNA's structure was even known?
- How did Beadle and Tatum use X-ray mutants of Neurospora crassa to link individual genes to specific enzymes?
- What does the 'one gene, one enzyme' hypothesis mean, and why was it the first causal bridge between heredity and chemistry?
- What did the double helix model explain that earlier proposed structures of DNA could not?
- How did the operon model change the way biologists thought about the genome as a whole?
- Why did bacteriophages become the model organism for early molecular biology?
- How did Luis Leloir's discovery of sugar nucleotides open up the field of glycobiology?
- What is the central dogma of molecular biology, and what direction does it say genetic information flows?
- What was the difference between Werner Arber's theoretical prediction and Hamilton Smith's isolation of an actual restriction enzyme?
- Why did Stanley Prusiner's proposal violate a principle molecular biologists considered settled about how biological information flows?
- How did the molecular biology revolution of the 1960s and 1970s vindicate McClintock's findings?
- In what way did the discovery of catalytic RNA break the central dogma as Francis Crick had framed it in 1958?
- Why did the discovery of split genes overturn the earlier picture drawn from bacterial genetics?
- How can a misfolded protein spread disease without any DNA or RNA involved?
- Why did Prusiner's prion hypothesis contradict the central dogma of molecular biology so directly?
- How does the period gene create a self-sustaining twenty-four-hour molecular oscillation inside a cell?
- What practical problem in biology did optical tweezers solve for researchers handling DNA and bacteria?