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Determination of the DNA structure would not have been possible if it was not for the work of Erwin Chargaff, an Austro-Hungarian biochemist. Originally a scientist who did his first work in lipids and lipoproteins, after reading about an experiment of Oswald Avery which showed that DNA was material encoding the genetic information, he turned his work onto DNA. Tetranucleotide hypothesis was the mainstream theory on Chargaff’s time which was proposed by Phoebus Levene. The theory suggested “that DNA was made up of equal amounts of four bases – adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine – but that it was organized in a way that was too simple to enable it to carry genetic information.” The four bases are held together by hydrogen bonds and they are located inside the DNA helical structure. However, the sugar and phosphate backbone are on the outside of the DNA structure. The two strands are complentary to each other and thus one strand depends on the other. Despite the results of Avery’s experiments that DNA encodes life the scientific community was convinced DNA was relatively too simple to carry genetic information. Chargaff was not satisfied with the tetranucleotide postulation because of the minimal data that supported it. #DNA #Chargaff #Adenine #Guanine #Cytosine #thymine #genetics #NikolaysGeneticsLessons #dnaReplication #helicase #enzymes #primase #primer #DNAPolymerase #ligase #replicatingDNA #copyingDNA #carbon #oxygen #539To339 #directionOfDNA #howDnaIsReplicated #tutorial #animation #cartoon #students #educational #antiparallel #semiconservative #supercoiling #topoisomerase #ssbProteins #carbonCounting #structureOfDna #purposeOfDnaReplication #cellDivision #teks #introduction #apBiology
