DNA Timeline

Gregor Mendel

Jan 1, 1856

Mendel's pea plant experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 established many of the rules of heredity, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian. Mendel worked with seven characteristics of pea plants: plant height, pod shape and color, seed shape and color, and flower position and color. With seed color, he showed that when a yellow pea and a green pea were bred together their offspring plant was always yellow. Mendel coined the terms “recessive” and “dominant” in reference to certain traits

Friedrich Miescher

Jan 1, 1869

Swiss physiological chemist Friedrich Miescher first identified what he called "nuclein" in the nuclei of human white blood cells, which we know today as deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). during the process, he came across a substance that had unusual chemical properties unlike the proteins he was searching for, with very high phosphorous content and a resistance to protein digestion.

Erwin Chargaff

Jan 1, 1944

WikipediaErwin Chargaf was an Austro-Hungarian biochemist who immigrated to the United States during the Nazi era. Through careful experimentation, Chargaff discovered two rules that helped lead to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. The first rule was that in DNA the number of guanine units equals the number of cytosine units, and the number of adenine units equals the number of thymine units. The second rule was that the relative amounts of guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine bases.

Gene therapy

Mar 9, 1950

Gene therapy is the therapeutic delivery of nucleic acid polymers into a patient's cells as a drug to treat disease.The origins of gene therapy can be traced back to the first live attenuated vaccines in the 1950s.[1] Although attenuated vaccines do not alter extant human genes, viruses are RNA polymers with their own genetic code that acts upon human cells, thus live vaccines can be considered a primitive form of gene therapy, albeit not in the sense that is generally implied today

The Hershey & Chase Experiments

Jan 1, 1952

These werew a series of various experiments conducted by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase that helped confirm that DNA is genetic material. In their experiments, Hershey and Chase showed that when bacteriophages, which are composed of DNA and protein, infect bacteria, their DNA enters the host bacterial cell, but most of their protein does not. Although the results were not conclusive, and Hershey and Chase were cautious in their interpretation, previous, contemporaneous and subsequent discover

Francis Crick & James Watson

Apr 1, 1953

"Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" was an article published by Francis Crick and James Watson. It was the first publication which described the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, using X-ray diffraction and the mathematics of a helix transform.This article is often termed a "pearl" of science because it is brief and contains the answer to a fundamental mystery about living organisms.

Arthur Kornberg

Jan 1, 1959

his discovery of "the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid.He was also awarded the Paul-Lewis Award in Enzyme Chemistry from the American Chemical Society in 1951, L.H.D. degree from Yeshiva University in 1962, as well as National Medal of Science in 1979

Rosalind Franklin

Jan 1, 1962

Franklin is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA while at King's College, London, which led to the discovery of the DNA double helix for which James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962.

Alexander Rich

Jan 1, 1963

Rich discovered polysomes: clusters of ribosomes which read one strand of mRNA simultaneously.Rich and co-workers at MIT grew a crystal of Z-DNA.[6] This was the first crystal structure of any form of DNA. After 26 years of attempts, Rich et al. finally crystallised the junction box of B- and Z-DNA. Their results were published in an October 2005 Nature journal.[7] Whenever Z-DNA forms, there must be two junction boxes that allow the flip back to the canonical B-form of DNA. Rich died on April 2

Test tube baby

Jan 1, 1978

The process involves monitoring and stimulating a woman's ovulatory process, removing an ovum or ova (egg or eggs) from the woman's ovaries and letting sperm fertilise them in a liquid in a laboratory. The fertilised egg (zygote) is cultured for 2–6 days in a growth medium and is then implanted in the same or another woman's uterus, with the intention of establishing a successful pregnancy.The first successful birth of a "test tube baby", Louise Brown, occurred in 1978. Louise Brown was born

CRISPR

Jan 1, 1987

The CRISPR/Cas system is a prokaryotic immune system that confers resistance to foreign genetic elements such as plasmids and phages,[4][5] and provides a form of acquired immunity.The CRISPR interference technique has enormous potential application, including altering the germline of humans, animals and other organisms, and modifying the genes of food crops.

Dolly the sheep

Jul 5, 1996

Dolly was a female domestic sheep, and the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell, using the process of nuclear transfer.She was cloned by Sir Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and colleagues at the Roslin Institute, part of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the biotechnology company PPL Therapeutics, based near Edinburgh.

First human chromosome is decoded

Jan 1, 1999

In 1999, an international team of researchers reached a major milestone, when they unravelled for the first time the full genetic code of a human chromosome. The chromosome in question was chromosome 22, which contained 33.5 million "letters," or chemical components.

Human Genome Project

Feb 12, 2001

The Human Genome Project produced the first complete sequences of individual human genomes. The human genome was the first of all vertebrates to be completely sequenced.As of 2012, thousands of human genomes have been completely sequenced, and many more have been mapped at lower levels of resolution

Mouse is the first mammal to have its genome decoded

Jan 1, 2002

The international Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium today announced the publication of a high-quality draft sequence of the mouse genome - the genetic blueprint of a mouse - together with a comparative analysis of the mouse and human genomes describing insights gleaned from the two sequences.

The Human Genome Project is completed

Mar 9, 2003

the Human Genome Project had published a 'rough draft' of the human genome, which included a 90% sequence of all three billion base pairs.During this time, researchers filled in the gaps and resolved DNA features in ambiguous areas until they had completed 99% of the human genome in final form. This final form contains 2.85 billion nucleotides, with a predicted error rate of just 1 event in every 100,000 bases sequenced. Surprises included the relatively small number of protein-encoding genes (b

identical twins

Jan 1, 2013

DNA Worldwide and their laboratory partners Eurofins Forensic were the first in the world to prove that twins have differences in their genetic make-up. The scientists applied ultra-deep, next generation sequencing and combined this with bioinformatics, sequencing the DNA from sperm samples of two twins and a blood sample of the child of one twin.

Further Breakthroughs

Jan 1, 2014

Throughout 2014 the world's scientists have continued to develop their understanding of DNA.This success could eventually lead to the creation of organisms that can produce medicines or industrial products organically.Geneticists have also made progress in the breakthrough field of epigenetics

Charles Darwin

Mar 8, 2016

He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors,and in a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding.

Stanley Norman Cohen

Mar 9, 2016

He wanted to understand how the genes of plasmids could make bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Cohen's investigations in 1972, combined with those of Paul Berg and Herbert Boyer, led to the development of methods to combine and transplant genes.[3] This discovery signaled the birth of genetic engineering and earned Cohen the National Medal of Science in 1988