Folding At Home: Fact of the Day Log

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Folding fact #132
1943 The Rockefeller Foundation, collaborating with the Mexican government, initiated the Mexican Agricultural Program. This was the first use of plant breeding as foreign aid.

 

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Folding fact #133
1943-1953 Cortisone was first manufactured in large amounts.

 

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Folding fact #134
1943 Salvador Luria and Max Delbruck performed "the fluctation test," the first quantitative study of mutation in bacteria. This was the beginning of bacterial genetics as a distinct discipline.

 

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Folding fact #135
1944 Oswald Theodore Avery, Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty determined that DNA is the hereditary material involved in transformation in pneumococcus bacteria. At first this theory gained little attention because scientists believed that DNA was too simple a molecule to contain all of the genetic information for an organism. Most scientists believed that only proteins were complex enough to express all of the genetic combinations.

 

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Folding fact #136
1944 Waksman isolated streptomycin, an effective antibiotic for TB.

 

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Folding fact #137
1944 Frederick Sanger used a new method called chromatography to determine the amino acid sequences of the bovine insulin molecule.

 

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Folding fact #138
1945 Max Delbruck and Salvador Luria developed a simple model system using phage for studying how genetic information is transferred to host bacterial cells. They organized a course to study a type of bacterial virus the T phages that consists of a protein coat containing DNA. Delbruck and Luria's course attracted many scientists to Cold Spring Harbor, which soon became a center for new ideas about explaining heredity at the cellular and molecular levels.

 

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Folding fact #139
1945 The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was formed in Quebec, Canada.

 

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Folding fact #140
1945 - 1950 Isolated animal cell cultures were grown in laboratories.

 

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Folding fact #141
1946 D.C. Salmon, a U.S. military adviser stationed in Japan, sent home Norin 10 - the source of the dwarfing gene that later helped produce the Green Revolution wheat varieties.

 

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Folding fact #142
1946 Edward Tatum and Joshua Lederberg showed that bacteria sometimes exchange genetic material directly, in a process they called conjugation.

 

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Folding fact #143
1946 Max Delbruck and Alfred Day Hershey independently discovered that the genetic material from different viruses can be combined to form a new type of virus. This process was another example of genetic recombination.

 

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Folding fact #144
1947 Barbara McClintock first reported on "transposable elements" - known today as "jumping genes." The scientific community failed to appreciate the significance of her discovery at the time.

 

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Folding fact #145
1950 Erwin Chargaff found that in DNA the amounts of adenine and thymine are about the same, as are the amounts of guanine and cytosine. These relationships are later known as "Chargaff's Rules" and serve as a key principle for Watson and Crick in assessing various models for the structure of DNA.

Earle and Enders studied monkey, mouse, and chick cells in cell cultures.

Artificial insemination of livestock using frozen semen, a long-time dream of farmers, was successfully accomplished.

 

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Folding fact #146
1951 Esther M. Lederberg discovered lambda phage, a virus of E. coli.

 

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Folding fact #147
1952 Joshua Lederberg and Norton Zinder showed that bacteria sometimes exchange genes by an indirect method, which they termed "transduction," in which a virus mediates the exchange by snaring bits of DNA from one bacterial cell and transporting the bacterial genes into the next cell it infects.

 

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Folding fact #148
1952 Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase performed the infamous "blender experiments" using phages. They postulated that if one could separately "tag" both the DNA and protein in the phages, then one could follow the DNA and proteins through the phages' replication process. Using virus particles with DNA tagged or 'labeled' with 32P phosphorous and protein labeled with 35S, Hershey and Chase showed that only the DNA of the virus enters the cell in significant amounts. This result supported a role for DNA has the genetic material, and refuted a role for protein.

 

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Folding fact #149
1952 J. Lederberg introduces the term plasmid to describe the bacterial structures he has discovered that contain extrachromosomal genetic material.

William Hayes discovered conjugation, the process whereby one bacterial cell pipes a copy of some of its genes into a second bacterial cell.

Electron microscopy showed the insides of cells to be filled with minute but well-formed anatomical structures, including vast numbers of a complex molecular organ now termed the ribosome.

Jean Brachet suggested that RNA, a nucleic acid, plays a part in the synthesis of proteins.

 

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Folding fact #150
1953 James Watson and Francis Crick proposed the double-stranded, helical, complementary, anti-parallel model for DNA.

William Hayes discovered that plasmids can be used to transfer introduced genetic markers from one bacterium to another.

L. Cavalli, J. Lederberg, and E. Lederberg discovered the F factor in E. coli.

Nature magazine published James Watson's and Francis Crick's manuscript describing the double helix structure of DNA.

Gey developed the HeLa human cell line.

 

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Folding fact #151
1955 Seymour Benzer at Purdue University devised an experimental setup to map mutations within a short genetic region of a particular bacterial virus. Over a five-year period, Benzer mapped recombinations of genetic material that distinguished mutational changes that had taken place at adjacent base pairs.

 

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Folding fact #152
1956 Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat took apart and reassembled the tobacco mosaic virus, demonstrating "self assembly."

 

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Folding fact #153
1957 Francis Crick and George Gamov worked out the "central dogma," explaining how DNA functions to make protein. Their "sequence hypothesis" posited that the DNA sequence specifies the amino acid sequence in a protein. They also suggested that genetic information flows only in one direction, from DNA to messenger RNA to protein, the central concept of the central dogma.

Mexico became self-sufficient in wheat production for the first time as a result of plant breeding efforts that began in 1943.

Matthew Meselson and Frank Stahl demonstrated the replication mechanism of DNA.

 

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Folding fact #154
1958 Coenberg discovered and isolated DNA polymerase, which became the first enzyme used to make DNA in a test tube.

The National Seed Storage Laboratory (NSSI) was opened in Fort Collins, Colorado, becoming the first long-term seed storage facility in the world.

 

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Folding fact #155
1959 Reinart regenerated plants from carrot callus culture.

Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod established the existence of genetic regulation - mappable control functions located on the chromosome in the DNA sequence - which they named the repressor and operon. They also demonstrated the existence of proteins that have dual specificities.

Nikita Krushchev introduced hybrid corn to the Soviet Union after visiting an Iowa corn farm belonging to Roswell Garst.

The steps in protein biosynthesis were delineated.

Systemic fungicides were developed.

 

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Folding fact #156
1960 The Rockefeller and Ford Foundation jointly established the first international agricultural research center in cooperation with the Philippine government and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).