In understanding the importance of the discovery of the structure of the ribosome, it is imperative to understand the groundbreaking experiments that led up to it. Prior to Avery, Macleod and McCarty’s experiment showing DNA as the transforming principle, it was widely assumed that proteins carried the hereditary information that encoded life. This was due to the fundamental understand of protein and DNA at the time. Chargaff had discovered that the composition of DNA varied from species to species, however containing only four alternating bases, DNA was seen as too simple to carry the complex information that encodes all of the information across life. Proteins on the other hand, were known as incredibly complex and variable in an infinite way. The Avery-Macleod-McCarty experiment, later repeated and verified by Hershey and Chase as well as X-ray crystallography experiments performed by Rosalind Franklin provided the clues needed for Watson and Crick to hypothesize about the structure of DNA, which was only later proven by Meselson and Stahl, who’s experiment showed the semi-conservative replication of DNA that provided a model for the successful replication and thus hereditability of DNA. In the early 1960’s, Nirenberg and Matthei were the first to crack the genetic code, using synthetic poly-uracil RNA, which showed that RNA controlled the production of specific types of proteins. Roughly 50 years later, the detailed mapping of the structure of the ribosome provided the last link to the puzzle.
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