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A second version of the central dogma is popular but incorrect. This is the simplistic DNA → RNA → protein pathway published by James Watson in the first edition of The Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965). Watson's version differs from Crick's because Watson describes a two-step (DNA → RNA and RNA → protein) process as the central ...
Efforts to understand how proteins are encoded began after DNA's structure was discovered in 1953. The key discoverers, English biophysicist Francis Crick and American biologist James Watson, working together at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, hypothesied that information flows from DNA and that there is a link between DNA and proteins. [2]
Oswald Avery discovered that the substance responsible for producing inheritable change in the disease-causing bacteria was neither a protein nor a lipid, rather deoxyribonucleic acid . He and his colleagues Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty suggested that DNA was responsible for transferring genetic information.
An artificial form of RNA consisting entirely of uracil-containing nucleotides (polyuridylic acid or poly-U) was added to the extract, causing it to form a protein composed entirely of the amino acid phenylalanine. This experiment cracked the first codon of the genetic code and showed that RNA controlled the production of specific types of protein.
Watson and Alexander Rich discussed in the PNAS, saying, "We shall not be able to check a structural relationship between RNA and protein synthesis or between RNA and DNA until we know the structure of RNA." [5] Evidences had been accumulating since the 1940s that protein synthesis occurs simultaneously with increased level of RNA in the cytoplasm.
Proteins consist of one or more polypeptides arranged in a biologically functional way, often bound to ligands such as coenzymes and cofactors, to another protein or other macromolecule such as DNA or RNA, or to complex macromolecular assemblies. [5] Amino acids that have been incorporated into peptides are termed residues.
Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a polymeric molecule that is essential for most biological functions, either by performing the function itself (non-coding RNA) or by forming a template for the production of proteins (messenger RNA). RNA and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) are nucleic acids.
The simple summary is that DNA makes RNA, and then RNA makes proteins. DNA, RNA, and proteins all consist of a repeating structure of related building blocks (nucleotides in the case of DNA and RNA, amino acids in the case of proteins). In general, they are all unbranched polymers, and so can be represented in the form of a string.